Aero theme power consumption difference

[alexk]

Somewhat interesting article about HP blaming the lower notebook battery life on Vista's Aero theme/inerface:
http://news.com.com/Vista%20draining...3-6181366.html

In my (highly unscientific) tests I saw no noticeable difference on my desktop PC (running Vista, 7900GTO graphics card and Nvidia's latest WHQL drivers for Vista) regardless of whether the Aero was on or off - both times the lowest idle power consumption that I've seen was about 126 watts (according to Kill-a-watt meter) and on average the power consumption was roughly the same (less than 5% difference) even when opening/closing multiple windows (or moving them around the screen). So I really don't see how the HP came to this conclusion (unless they perhaps offer a very old/poor drivers for the built-in GPUs which they use in their laptops)

[Kab]

I've seen no noticeable change myself in desktops but notebooks have been draining very quickly with Vista, I've experienced it too. It was found out to be wireless on Vista as the culprit in many online investigations. Here's an old report: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/v...ter-220637.php

[alexk]

Yea, I know that Vista is more power-hungry in general (mostly due to the new file indexing, memory managing and other services like SuperFetch and whatever else is constantly moving/accessing different files in background... or just like you said - due to the power state of WiFi adapter, which you can probably manually override (disable it when you don't use it)) but it was weird that HP tried to specifically blame it on the Vista's Aero...