Could Vista save the planet?
A Canadian study suggests switching from XP to Vista could save power costs and cut environmental damage. The study tags the average savings for business users could be $11 a year (Canadian dollars) per computer.
The study comes from Toronto firm InfoTech Research Group, which did the work on behalf of environmental consultants zerofootprint. Researchers assessed power consumption running XP Professional and Vista Ultimate on identical desktop and laptop machines in a variety of power settings. They didn’t measure the effects on monitors.
It turned out there was virtually no difference in power consumption when the machines were actually in use. Instead, the difference came in the various stand-by modes.
The researchers pointed out that not only does Vista inherently use less power in stand-by modes than XP, but that users are more likely to take advantage of such modes. This is because:
- Vista’s Standby mode is enabled by default but must be manually selected in XP.
- XP’s Standby settings options aren’t particularly easy to find.
- There’s no way to easily control power management across a network in XP.
- Vista is more reliable in detecting when a PC is idle.
- Vista resumes from Standby in two seconds compared with five in XP.
The conclusions back Microsoft’s own research, which estimates the average user wastes $55.63 (US dollars, including monitor power) by leaving computers switched on when not in use. The firm also touted the power-saving benefits of Vista’s Sleep option (which combines the flexibility of XP’s Hibernation with much lower power requirements), the fact a Vista computer brought out of Sleep for an automated task (such as a scheduled virus scan) will return to Sleep two minutes after the task is done, and the way Superfetch makes it quicker to resume your work when coming out of Sleep mode.
Even though $11 a year adds up in large organisations, it might not be enough to persuade a sceptical firm to make the XP-Vista leap. But it does appear Vista users waste less power, and it certainly seems worthwhile Microsoft pushing the environmental angle, particularly with case studies.
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July 14th, 2008
But, for a fair test, shouldn’t the Vista machine have been of a higher spec and thus consuming more power than that of the XP machine so that they would then have been on equal terms performance wise?
Plus, of course, there are the extra costs incurred by employers or individuals to purchase those higher spec machines to run Vista to be taken into consideration. Not forgetting the detrimental effects on the environment and energy consumed in the manufacture of those machines.
It would also have been interesting to have included in the “study” how much money is lost in production whilst personnel idly wait for their Vista machine to boot up compared to that of the relatively short boot time for XP.
My conclusion from this test is that if you are donated, without charge, two identical computers, one loaded with XP and the other with Vista, switch them both on but don’t do any work with them and don’t connect them to a monitor then the Vista option consumes marginally less power. In fact around 0.6 cents (Canadian) per hour per computer thus per individual based on an average working year.
Where do I apply to get paid for doing similar pointless tests – I want some of the action, especially if someone were to tell me what results they want before I do the test (not that I’m suggesting they did of course
).
July 14th, 2008
Of course, there are widespread problems (documented online and in forums) with sleep/standy and hibernation in Windows Vista (sporadic BSODs, reboots on wake, etc.), particularly in laptops, so actually sleep/standby/hibernation in Vista does NOT necessarily result in power savings whatsoever because there is no guarantee that these low-power modes will even work. The result is that people with these OS problems simply leave the machines on all the time.
July 14th, 2008
If you want a greener planet, use Linux. On a dual boot laptop, Vista (after extensive hacks to minimize RAM usage) uses 550 MB RAM at desktop with nothing running.
With Ubuntu 8.04 on the same laptop. It was measured using 165 MB RAM at desktop with nothing running.
Seems that MSFT once again is skewing numbers to fit their agenda. XP uses less power than Vista and Linux uses even less power.
Remember that Vista cannot run on the EeePc type laptops because a lot of processing power is needed. So either XP or Linux can only run on those computers.
That speaks volumes.
July 16th, 2008
Never mind the planet, can Vista save Microsoft? Can Vista save itself? Does anyone care what Vista can save? No? I didn’t think so.
What Microsoft need to do, if they want to remain in the market, is write a decent operating system. If they write a decent operating system, it won’t have so many problems, and the problems it does have won’t be so serious. Furthermore, if Microsoft wrote a decent operating system it would be more efficient, and thus, by extension, more environmentally friendly. Ralph is quite correct to say that Linux is a greener alternative. How it must gall Microsoft that they spent years of their time and billions of their dollars, and they still couldn’t come up with anything that comes close to Linux, environmentally or otherwise. The plodding colossus with “90% market share” just keeps banging its head against the wall, each time expecting that, by some miracle, it won’t hurt any more. Is anyone from Microsoft listening? The market is more savvy, and the buyers are more sophisticated, so spin, hype and marketing just won’t cut it any more – you need to write some decent code, and you need to start conducting yourselves as upright corporate citizens (if you can manage that, it would be *genuinely* innovative).