this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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Microsoft officially recommends a new PC and OneDrive to update to Windows 11 (www.neowin.net)
submitted 2 months ago by Frellwit to c/technology
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[–] bandwidthcrisis 146 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I once ran the windows Troubleshooter to get an old scanner working, and the final page told me to but a new scanner!

I plugged it in to a mini PC I use as a backup server and the scanner worked fine with Linux.

And another recommendation issue: I noticed that my Windows laptop has a "reduce your carbon footprint" settings section that tells me to reduce power settings, screen brightness etc. but it's completely lacking a "stop giving me AI search results in Bing" section.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Switching from Windows to Linux on my Framework laptop makes my battery last 2-3 times as long. They should just have a switch to Linux recommendation to reduce your carbon footprint.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Are you using a framework 13? While I find the battery life to be usable, if it's that much worse on Windows I'm not sure I would have gotten a framework if I used windows lol.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. 11th gen Framework 13, so one of the first ones. Since I got it I had to use Windows exclusively because of some client work, and battery life was pitiful. 2-3 hours perhaps? Once that project finished I swapped out the SSD and put on Ubuntu with KDE. I was expecting the batter life to be worse, but it is demonstrably better. I now get more like 6 hours, albeit with my power plan on efficiency.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I have one of the newer AMD models and I find it has about 2-3 hours of batter life, though it spends most of it's time suspended for my use case. I use Fedora and have the "balanced" profile selected. I don't mind the poor battery life since the processor is leaps and bounds better than the 6th gen 2 core Intel I was using before.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Win11 also says that showing seconds in the taskbar "reduces battery life"/"increases power consumption"

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

While it sounds ridiculous, there is a reasoning for this even nowadays:

Any periodic activity with a rate faster than one minute incurs the scrutiny of the Windows performance team, because periodic activity prevents the CPU from entering a low-power state. Updating the seconds in the taskbar clock is not essential to the user interface, unlike telling the user where their typing is going to go, or making sure a video plays smoothly. And the recommendation is that inessential periodic timers have a minimum period of one minute, and they should enable timer coalescing to minimize system wake-ups.

Found 1 test that seems to confirm battery life is slightly worse (2%) with seconds enabled. But this is true only when nothing is going on on screen. If you would actually work on PC, I imagine difference would be practically nonexistent.

All that said, I use seconds on my private and work PC. Was pissed when MS initially removed this as an option.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The moment I heard about the option was the moment I literally searched on how to enable/install this single KB-Update just so I can use it :P

Regarding the battery: That would be like leaving the desktop on at all times and just doing something else. This could be appropriate for an e-ink display. Maybe a PC should embed what form-factor it is in the bios like android phones do (e.g. phone, tablet, phablet) and the display report what type of panel it is (e.g. e-ink, TN, IPS, VA, QLED/OLED hybrid).
You can actually see those specs with AIDA64 on a phone. Very neat

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

The only time that would make a difference is if you're staring at a blank page and the only thing causing the screen to update is the clock. Theoretically the GPU could go completely to sleep, except for having to draw the updated clock every second.

But there's a reason battery life is commonly measured as "hours of video playback". If the laptop's not actually doing anything you may as well turn it off and get weeks of battery life.

[–] bandwidthcrisis 7 points 2 months ago

My god. It really does!

Oh no! I left notepad.exe open. That cursor was flashing on and off for hours! I'm sorry everyone!

[–] Kbobabob 2 points 2 months ago

Are you saying you use Bing for searches? If you don't want that then why not use a different search?