Which draws less power - win or Linux?

[GHA]

More arduino fun this morning with a new current sensor and real time clock. And the winner is....



Actually, maybe not a perfect test but interesting.

All on the same old toshiba laptop with the battery taken out , current measured going into a maplins 12v/19v 150w car charger. In mA, maybe not exactly calibrated but shouldn't be too far out.

First chuck was booting into win7, starting up opencpn and having a look around, then shutting down.
Next was ubuntu, booting up, having a hunt for opencpn which doesn't seem top be in there, then power down.
Then opensuse. Couldn't remember the password for that so didn't even get in.
And finally the newer laptop again going into win7.

So there you have it, maybe win isn't so bad after all.

Though I rarely touch a PC these days, nearly all android tablet. What a nightmare, you have to type every key! It doesn't fill all the missing letters in for you :disgust:

 

[bedouin]

To be honest in most cases I would expect Win to perform well in terms of power consumption. There is a lot of pressure on the hardware manufacturers to reduce power consumption, and that often requires the cooperation of the OS.

Windows has both the budget and the incentive to optimise the power efficiency of the hardware, and manufacturers have a big incentive to ensure that their hardware is power efficient when running windows.

There just isn't the same coherent approach within Linux to addressing these issues

 

[JohnGC]

I would expect the backlight to account for a significant portion of the power.

Did you have the same backlight settings for all OSs?

 

[charles_reed]

Win7 has proved much more economical than WinXP - but, providing you don't run multiple screens in Suse12.3, it still gives me about 20% greater endurance than Win7 on a E325 ThinkPad.
That's mainly due to a much more accessible menu for power saving & shutdown.
On the MSI, running a 32bit Celeron 723CPU and Win7 Home the saving is much greater.
It appears that the benefits offered by Linux are greater with 32 bit machines than 64bit. Best however is the greater stability one gets from Linux.

 

[GHA]

Win7 has proved much more economical than WinXP - but, providing you don't run multiple screens in Suse12.3, it still gives me about 20% greater endurance than Win7 on a E325 ThinkPad.
.

How did you measure the current draw?

I've tried it with a meter before but as it fluctuates to much it's difficult to get a reading.
The data for the graph above was logged every 0.2 seconds.

 

[GHA]

Did you have the same backlight settings for all OSs?

No idea, looked the same

 

[JumbleDuck]

Next was ubuntu, booting up, having a hunt for opencpn which doesn't seem top be in there, then power down.

I usually run Xubuntu (XFCE4 desktop) but I use Lubuntu (LXDE desktop) on a couple or Netbooks, and it lasts very well there.