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Vista Runs Hot on Macbook Pro

Posted by Zonk on Sun Sep 10, 2006 07:33 PM
from the sweaty-legs dept.
PetManimal writes "Ken Mingis, Computerworld's Mac editor, has given Vista a spin on his Macbook Pro in order to review and compare hardware performance with OS X. It's not a rigorous benchmarking, but he does notice a few issues relating to power consumption: 'Since installing Vista, I have found that my MacBook Pro runs hot. No doubt Microsoft hasn't worked on power management issues that might affect Apple hardware, which leaves me to wonder whether I'm slowly cooking the motherboard of my laptop. It's not hot enough to fry an egg on the aluminum case, but my laptop is noticeably warmer than when I use Mac OS X. I've also noticed that battery life is substantially reduced. Once again, energy management for Apple hardware is not likely at the top of Microsoft's list. Once Apple writes updated drivers to work with Vista, I'd expect these issues to be addressed.'"

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[+] Ask Slashdot: Will Apple Follow Microsoft's Lead to Restrictive DRM? 326 comments
Steve Ryan asks: "The direction Microsoft are taking with Windows (for example, the DRM issues in Vista) have led me to believe Windows will soon be an OS which controls the user, rather than the other way round. I like XP, and I find it stable, but I do not want to upgrade to an OS (Vista) which is restrictive. This leaves me with either Linux or Mac OS X. I like Linux, but it may not work with my laptop, so I don't really want to risk it. OS X seems nice. I spend most of my time writing documents and surfing the web, so it should handle everything I want, and I would be happy to buy a lovely MacBook Pro. This leaves me with my question: Will Apple follow Microsoft's lead and implement a DRM loving policy?"
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  • Wow (Score:5, Interesting)

    by daveschroeder (516195) * <das@doit.[ ]c.edu ['wis' in gap]> on Sunday September 10 2006, @07:35PM (#16077868) Homepage
    Submitter seems to have cherry-picked one thing from the article...

    1. Vista runs hot on MacBook Pro because he's using a beta OS without hardware drivers, using a mechanism for running it that itself is still beta. (And uh, I got news for you: everything "runs hot" on MacBook Pro. ;-)

    But:

    2. Apple doesn't support Vista on MacBook Pro and doesn't make Vista drivers for Apple hardware, but probably will after Vista and Boot Camp are both, you know, actually shipping, supported products.

    Seems like the submitter managed to leave out quite a few things from the article, like the fact that the subtitle is:

    Apple's top-end laptop runs Vista better than a high-end Sony Vaio

    ...and pretty much the entire rest of the article, which is downright positive, and managed to only come up with "Vista runs hot on Macbook (sic) Pro", something only mentioned in a couple of sentences on page 3 of the article.

    The author makes claims that while using an unsupported, beta OS on hardware for which driver profiles don't exist in conjunction with another beta, unsupported product (Boot Camp), he wonders whether he's "slowly cooking the motherboard", even given the hardware safeties built in, and then goes on to say that he expects these to be fixed when Apple releases drivers for their hardware that actually work with Vista, and Vista is no longer, oh, I don't know, a beta product, and not even out yet?

    So, why does the entire submission revolve around the ONE item that likely won't be news, and indeed will be completely moot, by the time Vista ships and Apple actually supports Boot Camp as a product (when Leopard ships)?

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)

      by Coward the Anonymous (584745) on Sunday September 10 2006, @07:57PM (#16077937)
      So, why does the entire submission revolve around the ONE item that likely won't be news, and indeed will be completely moot


      You must be new here, welcome to Slashdot.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)

      by IvanD (719006) on Sunday September 10 2006, @07:57PM (#16077938)
      At least it wasn't a Dell, with a Sony battery and a Maxtor HDD! That would probably blow a whole builing!
      [ Parent ]
    • by spoco2 (322835) on Sunday September 10 2006, @08:27PM (#16078049) Homepage
      "Apple's top-end laptop runs Vista better than a high-end Sony Vaio"
      So, the Mac he bought a few months ago performs better than a Sony he bough almost a year ago? How is that not expected? You compare two PC laptops of the same age difference and you're going to get the same result.

      It's like saying 'Gee, my brand new Mac is faster than the old PC I'm replacing, Macs are so much better'

      Bah and humbug.
      [ Parent ]
      • by Sillygates (967271) * on Sunday September 10 2006, @08:41PM (#16078083) Homepage Journal
        This guy compared a dual core apple to a single core vaio. Thats hardly a fair representation of a high end PC vs apple benchmark.

        Also, acording to a few reports, the MacBook has an underclocked gpu [reghardware.co.uk] (possibly to reduce heat), so it may not be able to even match a similarly loaded machine, at least when it comes to directX/OpenGL, Vista's territory.
        [ Parent ]
        • by feanor512 (905622) on Monday September 11 2006, @12:38AM (#16078897)
          I can confirm that. The X1600 Pro in the MBP 15" in Windows XP runs at 310/290 instead of the ATI default 475/475. I have no way of testing it in OS X though. It is unstable at 475/475 which leads me to believe that Apple has undervolted it. Also, it runs at about 400/400 in the 20" iMac.
          [ Parent ]
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        Sorry, not going to happen.

        Windows will continue to be able to run on Parallels Desktop, and the forthcoming VMWare Workstation for Mac OS X. There's no way that Microsoft or anyone else would be able to stop it (unless they continually broke it intentiona
                  • Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)

                    by SillyNickName4me (760022) <dotslash@bartsplace.net> on Monday September 11 2006, @09:41AM (#16080452) Homepage
                    Are you fucking retarded? Seriously.

                    Are you fucking uncapable of making a normal argument?

                    Microsoft fucking with OS/2's "run Windows apps without buying Windows" and Microsoft fucking with "buy a copy of Windows to run on your Mac" are two completely different things.

                    And the issue here is that you are lacking some rather important knowledge.

                    1. Microsoft did get payed for a Winows license for every copy of OS/2 that included this support out of the box

                    2. There existed a cheaper OS/2 for Windows version which required a Microsoft Windows 3.1 version from Microsoft.

                    2. is completely comparable to the situation we are talking about, and in case of 1. they were being compensated for the OS and could sell their applications.

                    So lets see, I wont call you retarded, ignorant hits it better.
                    [ Parent ]
  • Not to troll, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ryan Amos (16972) on Sunday September 10 2006, @07:36PM (#16077876)
    Why is this news? A beta OS doesn't run at full capacity on a specific piece of hardware? More likely is that Apple needs to release Vista power management drivers. They probably will do so once Vista is officially released. It's not really worthy of a news posting; maybe as a footnote in a larger review of Vista itself.
    • Re:Not to troll, but... (Score:5, Funny)

      by supabeast! (84658) on Sunday September 10 2006, @07:45PM (#16077904)
      "Why is this news? A beta OS doesn't run at full capacity on a specific piece of hardware? More likely is that Apple needs to release Vista power management drivers."

      Just think about it this way - posting garbage like this keeps Zonk off the streets, where he's sit around all day leeching power to code useless PPC linux F/OSS apps on a used toilet-seat iBook in-between bottles of Mad Dog 20/20. Be sure to respond to stories like this, or he might go the way of John Katz, and end up out in the real world inflicting himself upon the rest of us.
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Not to troll, but... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Greyfox (87712) on Sunday September 10 2006, @08:08PM (#16077981) Homepage
        Ahh yeah. Poor John Katz... Killed by a pack of wild dingos while doing research for his 20 part "Columbine Revisited" series of articles that was to be his great comeback. Tragic, really...
        [ Parent ]
  • this isn't exactly new (Score:5, Informative)

    by thegoogler (792786) on Sunday September 10 2006, @07:39PM (#16077883)
    windows 2000 even always ran hotter than any other OS on my laptops, i remember hearing an explanation a long time ago that they ignore the "wait" cycles or somesuch running the cpu harder than intended.
  • Beta Software (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 10 2006, @07:42PM (#16077893)
    Once Apple writes updated drivers to work with Vista, I'd expect these issues to be addressed.

    Hello, McFly (or dumb reporter) but Apple's beta Boot Camp software is not designed to run Vista. You have no reasonable expectation that these issues will be addressed since Apple did not make Boot Camp for Vista. I will say it again -- Boot Camp is beta and it is not designed to run Vista, an operating system that itself is beta.
  • Um... a few things... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MSFanBoi2 (930319) on Sunday September 10 2006, @07:49PM (#16077912)
    First, why is this even considered news?

    Second, last I checked Vista was not complete. If people even bothered to read the release notes for RC1 you would see Microsoft specifically mentions that the power savings functionality is not yet complete.

    Third, as was mentioned multiple times by the reviewer, Apple has not released drivers for Vista yet. Since when is this Microsoft's fault?
  • by aldheorte (162967) on Sunday September 10 2006, @08:01PM (#16077950)
    From the article, highlighted in the introduction:

    "my laptop is noticeably warmer than when I use Mac OS X. I've also noticed that battery life is substantially reduced."

    Come on, that's not even the center point of the article, nor is that anything but subjective, anecdotal observation. Of one. As someone else has said here in the past, even the plural of anecdote is not data. Get a surface temperature thermometer, get some real data. Who knows? Does this guy sense a 3 degree difference as a lot or a 20 degree difference as a lot? Would either of those differences even matter? Did he run Mac OS X under the same conditions as Vista - was the room temperature the same? How about the apps he was running? I could care less about Vista, but, really, folks, how is this newsworthy that some one guy thinks his one laptop runs hotter running Vista the one time he tried it?

    And please stop with the Vista posts. We don't need daily updates, thanks though.
  • Why would he expect Apple to fix it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AugstWest (79042) on Sunday September 10 2006, @08:04PM (#16077967)
    I'm running XP in Boot Camp on my Macbook Pro. Battery life is dismal. Heat is outrageous. And if you try to use it like a real laptop, where you close the thing and it suspends, and open it and it resumes, well, you're in for a major disappointment. Half the time the thing goes to sleep, the only way to wake it is by hard rebooting. For some reason, after you shut the thing you hear the USB reconnect sound, and the screen lights up again. While closed. If your commute is very long, you'll arrive home to find a dead laptop battery.

    I'm not bitching, I love this thing, and I'm only using XP to run Eve. Unfortunately, that's turned into "most of the time." I'm just suggesting that people remain realistic about Apple's driver support. Their development time is better spent elsewhere.
  • Windows Drains Battery? (Score:4, Informative)

    by aitikin (909209) on Sunday September 10 2006, @08:16PM (#16078010)
    Everyone I know who has a windows laptop of any form has always found that the battery drains quickly. Granted I don't know too many people who condition their batteries properly or anything of the sort, but it kind of leads me to believe that Windows doesn't do a whole lot with power management over all.
  • that would be a hardware problem (Score:4, Insightful)

    by oohshiny (998054) on Sunday September 10 2006, @08:38PM (#16078076)
    I think any laptop that overheats because of software is badly designed. Critical functionality, like running the fans etc., should not depend on the operating system. If the OS can influence the behavior of such hardware functionality, there should be smart failsafe mechanisms.

    Note that even supported operating systems can get wedged, either because of bugs in the OS, or because of driver problems or other hardware issues; you don't want your laptop to go up in flames when your Ethernet card develops a fault and makes the kernel hang.
  • Upgrade?! (Score:3, Funny)

    by cashman73 (855518) on Sunday September 10 2006, @08:46PM (#16078096) Journal
    All slashdotters that actually intend on upgrading ANY computer to Windows Vista please,. . . STAND ON YOUR HEAD!!!!
    • I concur (Score:4, Informative)

      by rajafarian (49150) on Sunday September 10 2006, @07:59PM (#16077946)
      Windows.* runs hot

      Windows runs one or two degrees Celsius hotter on my workstation, (AMD XP-M @ 2.3 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 6600GT) than Linux. {Temperature read off GKrellm in Linux vs nVidia system monitor in Windows.}

      My guess was that Windows' System Idle Process was using CPU cycles even when nothing else was but I stopped caring since I spend so little time in Windows anyway.
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:I concur (Score:5, Funny)

        by nmb3000 (741169) <nmb3000@that-google-mail-site.com> on Sunday September 10 2006, @08:20PM (#16078024) Homepage Journal
        My guess was that Windows' System Idle Process was using CPU cycles even when nothing else was

        Damned System Idle Process, regularly hogging 100% of my CPU! I bet it uses even more in Vista!

        So I try to end the process and Task Manager gives me some BS about it not being valid. What if I want to use a different idle process? Hmm? Vendor lock-in! Monopoly!

        Just one more reason to drop M$ and Windoze if you ask me.
        [ Parent ]
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        Asus is one vendor who manufactures apple's products. I doubt asus sells an identical unit with the EFI "bios" and all. However, if Asus helped with the ACPI code, it would explain the entire problem. They have a bad habit of only implementing just enou