Battery life: Windows 7 leaves Vista for dust

Upgrading a newer machine from Windows Vista to Windows 7 might mean that you get to see the last few minutes of that DVD on a long flight.

At a demo on Tuesday, Microsoft showed two identical laptops playing the same DVD, with the Windows 7-equipped laptop getting 20 per cent better battery life than one running Windows Vista. In general, users can expect newer systems running Windows 7 to offer 10 per cent to 20 per cent better battery improvement when watching a DVD.

Microsoft principal program manager Ruston Panabaker said: "We're achieving a very significant amount of battery savings."

Microsoft and Intel declined to say just how much overall battery life improvement Windows 7 might offer as compared to Vista, saying there are too many factors that can influence such results.

"I don't want to state a number," Panabaker said at the event, which was organised by Intel and Microsoft.

The event was designed to outline the joint work that the two halves of Wintel have been doing to make Windows 7 perform better in areas such as virtualisation, power management, and performance.

On the performance side, Microsoft and Intel showed a reference system that can boot up in 11 seconds, although again real-world performance is likely to vary a lot based on what's inside the PC and how well tuned it is. For instance, the system shown Tuesday had a solid-state drive and other high-performance componets.

The move comes as Microsoft gears up for the 22 October launch of Windows 7.

Perhaps the most encouraging thing for Microsoft is the fact that Intel itself is willing to use Windows 7 within its own corporate walls. The chipmaker has been an XP-only shop throughout Vista's life. In an interview here, Intel VP Stephen Smith said Intel had some internal applications that weren't Vista-compatible and the benefits of moving to Vista didn't justify the costs.

By contrast, Smith said several hundred people inside Intel are already running Windows 7 on their corporate machines.

CNET News' Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

Original article: Microsoft: Windows 7 can offer better battery life from CNET News.com