Marghanita da Cruz <[email protected]> writes:
> Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
>> Jonathan wrote:
>>
>>> I remember that there was at some stage, soemthing with the EULA with
>>> Windows. Essentially, it can only be valid if you voluntarily accept it,
>>> therefore, if you don't you can uninstall it, send the CD's and
>>> documentation back to Microsoft and they have to "refund" you the value.
>>> Never tried it, or talked face to face with ayone that has tried it though.
>>>
>>> Any thoughts?
>>
>> Yep, about 700 times too much trouble. My time is worth more than that.
>>
>> I am shopping around anyway, so the effort of finding a machine with Linux
>> pre-installed is part of that effort anyway.
>>
> <snip>
>
> Is anyone aware of any energy usage tests versions of Linux vs Vista
> etc on the various laptops/PCs?
The Intel sponsored "Less Watts" project have some information, as I
recall, and the Linux Thinkpads list certainly discuss it regularly.[1]
> One of the issues I do have with my 2004 Targa, on which I initially
> installed Knoppix 3.2 and subsequently upgraded to Knoppix 5.1, is
> that i don't think the efficiency drivers are working very well the
> fan seems to be on constantly, though it has been better in 5.1 than
> 3.2
That is almost certainly true: Linux has less power saving that Windows
more or less across the board, although that is gradually getting closer
to parity as time moves on.
The usual candidates are less display / GPU power saving, less ability
to spin down the hard disks and less general support for power
management of the various other controllers.
A large part of this is that these are the less well documented areas of
the hardware, usually tuned by the vendor or OEM to the specific
hardware under Windows, so Linux has a lot of catching up to do.
A good Thinkpad usually comes in at ~ 2 watts higher consumption than
Windows, after aggressive manual tuning on a set of machines that are
quite well understood.
Regards,
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] I presume other hardware-specific lists also do, but since I don't
own their hardware I don't pay attention.
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