14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has introduced an array of features into Windows Vista designed to enhance power management and savings. Vista's energy conservations are grouped into five categories: centralized manageability for IT professionals, default settings optimized for best user experience and energy savings, performance, reliability and hybrid sleep. At the bottom of this article you have each category exemplified in detail.
"We made changes to dramatically improve idle power consumption. While Windows XP did a great job of lowering CPU speed and voltage whenever possible, in Windows Vista we added enhanced capabilities to use power more efficiently on multi-core systems. And we have created new APIs so that driver and application developers can get notifications about the power scheme being used on the system and then adapt their behavior for the power scheme," said Jim Allchin, Microsoft Co-President, Platform and Services Division.
Additionally, Microsoft is delivering enhanced control over power management configurations parameters via Group Policy in corporate deployment scenarios. But in the end, Microsoft's optimized energy conservation refers to power management during a system's 6,160 potential idle hours annually. In this context, deploying Windows Vista on a Pentium 4 with a 17-inch CRT monitor will save $70.77 per year, while for a 17-inch LCD the sum is only $55.63.
Here is a list with the power saving features in Windows Vista:
Centralized manageability for IT professionals: - Power settings that are per-machine - Powerful command-line configuration tool (powercfg.exe) - Group policy support for all inbox power settings
Default settings optimized for best user experience and energy savings: - A default time out that automatically blanks the display - A system idle timer for entering Sleep - Dynamic processor power management for capable desktop and laptop hardware - Default Off that is actually Sleep (Start menu, sleep power button, button, and lid switch)
Performance: - Immediate responsiveness to Sleep or Resume - Consistent Sleep resume performance by using Microsoft Superfetch? advanced memory management technology - Enhanced Plug and Play performance
Reliability: - Applications, services, and drivers that cannot block Sleep transitions - Improved idle detection that helps ensure that a PC awakened from the network or for scheduled activity returns to Sleep after 2 minutes of idleness - Built-in diagnostics for Sleep and Resume that: - Return reliability data to Microsoft if a user joins the Customer Experience Improvement Program - Enable Microsoft to proactively address Sleep reliability issues if they arise (that is, post-release driver updates that impact Sleep and Resume)
Hybrid Sleep (on desktops): - A system that resumes from disk if power is lost in Sleep (nonvolatile, like Hibernate) - Notebooks do not require hybrid sleep because they have a battery for reliability - A normal Resume from memory (fast, like Standby) - A combination of Standby (Suspend to RAM) and Hibernate (Suspend to Disk) - Simple "Off" metaphor - No requirement for users to distinguish between Standby and Hibernate-they merely choose "Sleep" and it just works