Reduce power consumption in vista?

[shadowwyvern]

Hello,

I recently installed vista (64 bit) on my T60, mainly to try it out. One of the biggest things I was looking to learn was how much power it would use vs XP. The results so far have been, well, tragic.

XP will let me get down to around 13W on battery, w/o wireless, doing basic stuff, average with wireless and some web browsing is around 15W; If I see 19W, I am really cranking at it.

Vista, on the other hand, cannot seem to idle lower than 16.8W (doing absolutely nothing), and just launching word, etc would bump it up to 25W (which I have never seen on XP). All this is with aero turned off.

I am not sure if it is just because the 64 bit drivers are not mature yet, or if it is some other reason. I am noticing also that my wireless card will now appear in device manager regardless of what I have the wifi switch set to. In XP, it would kindly completely disappear.

Is there something I am missing here? Or does vista really use that much more power?

 

[jasonlitka]

Try disabling the wireless in the BIOS to see if lowers your power consumption over just using the switch. If it does, it sounds like a driver/applet issue.