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Vista Runs Hot on Macbook Pro
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Sep 10, 2006 06:33 PM
from the sweaty-legs dept.
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)
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)
You must be new here, welcome to Slashdot.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Hardware safeties will prevent immediate motherboard damage. Running hot might still reduce the lives of components over the long term. Kind of like a car that's running at the edge of the red zone with a quart or two less of oil than it should have. It won't seize up today or tomorrow, but it probably won't last 250,000 miles.
-b.
Re: (Score:2)
Better than an almost year old Sony (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:Better than an almost year old Sony (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Better than an almost year old Sony (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Now, now... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, he should of just written "Macbook runs hot when pushed hard". Vista hogs system resources, which means that the CPU/GPU/HDD have to work harder, which means they use more power and generate more heat. It's about as insightful as saying "Macbook battery life suffers when encodi
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
How is a Sony Vaio MS's best effort?
Wouldnt that be, like, Sony making crappy laptops?
-Red
Re:Way to miss the point. Non free still broken. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 intentionally, and were specifically devoting engineering efforts to artificially "breaking" Windows on only Mac OS X versions of Parallels and VMWare products, and only Apple hardware (which contains a *lot* of generic Intel components)). It would have to be extrem
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And we know Microsoft would never do that...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re:Not to troll, but... (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Windows.* runs hot (Score:2, Interesting)
From what I've seen - unless you've got your minerals made out of
I concur (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
this isn't exactly new (Score:5, Informative)
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Seems interesting enough (Score:2, Insightful)
Beta Software (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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?
Non-Scientifc Analysis, Please Stop With The Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
What the hardware gives the software takes away (Score:2, Troll)
This shouldn't be a surprise. Windows has always been a resource hog on the PC, and it's always the case that when the hardware improves to handle the current version of Windows, Microsoft goes and releases a new version with some extra bells and whistles that have been bolted on and thus require more hardware capability. There are exceptions of course. I remember the first time I upgraded from NT 3.1 to NT 3.51 and the improvement in speed and responsiveness on the same hardware was amazing! Then they went
Re: (Score:2)
Compared to what ? Certainly not any OS of comparable functionality.
and it's always the case that when the hardware improves to handle the current version of Windows, [...]
Hardware has been more than fast enough to run any current OS of its day since the late '90s. Heck, the only period of time that even remotely resembles your comment was the year or two around 1995.
[...] Microsoft goes and releases a new version with some extra bells and whis
Why would he expect Apple to fix it? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Seeing as how close Intel and Apple are nowadays, i would imagine Apple's ACPI implementation complies with Intel's specs.
On the other hand, Microsoft make their own compiler which has many subtle differences from Intels, in particular it has an ability to ignore many errors that violate the spec and are thus flagged by Intel's compiler. Their implementation of ACPI implements the same toll
Windows Drains Battery? (Score:4, Informative)
That has been my observation, too (Score:2)
that would be a hardware problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re: (Score:2)
"Critical functionality, like running the fans etc., should not depend on the operating system."
You, and Apple have made an exception to this which is: "It is OK for the OS to slow the fans down."
Why the exception? Why can't the temp sensor feed directly to the fan speed control?
Couldn't someone write a program to turn the fan to its lowest setting and then do something in a loop?
I'm still puzzled as to why anyone would think this a good idea.
Re: (Score:2)
And they do?
If the OS can influence the behavior of such hardware functionality, there should be smart failsafe mechanisms.
And there aren't?
-ben
Why should Apple make Vista drivers... (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems more likely that, since *ASUS* makes and sells these as Windows laptops, they will be quick to support Vista (and possibly already do).
For the latest drivers for the 17" Macbo^H^H^H^H^H Asus W2Jb, check this site:
http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLa nguage=en-us [asus.com]
Select the W2000 series and
Re: (Score:2)
Okay, that's clearly rubbush. They manufacture for Apple, they don't design.
You should be careful about throwing around the insult "fool" while making factually incorrect statements.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Upgrade?! (Score:3, Funny)
Runs hot on my DELL too! (Score:2, Interesting)
THIS OS IS BAD NEWS! There is not a single tangible feature about it that I have liked. Apart from being DRM'd up the wazoo. They took XP, and just shuffled and "context-ified" all of the menus to make it as inefficient as possible for any power user. It is absolutely dumbed down to the point of being insufferable. I mean there are LI
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I really want to make a snarky comment about how comp-sci majors tend to know jack shit about user interface design, while also thinking that they know *everything* about computers because they have a comp sci degre