Windows7How

Windows 7 Energy Consumption

September 10, 2009

Since the destruction of the ozone lair and the increasing consumption of electricity in the world, the manufacturers of all kinds of devices started producing appliances that consume less but continue being effective as they were, or even more. Computers are no exception to this rule and so far the responsible for energy consumption were only the manufacturers of hardware; they optimized the components to consume less and those that were developing software had to simply adapt to the changes.

The giant Microsoft, however, went a step further. The developers at Redmond rightly understood that hardware without software is just a piece of metal, plastic or silicon and software should be the one that dictates the consumption of energy instead of only adapting to it. And what’s the name of the most used software? It is a well-known fact that that’s an operating system and Microsoft, since specializes in the segment, has decided to introduce many innovations into their newest OS. These innovations will greatly reduce consumption of energy of the machines that have the OS installed. The life of the battery of the notebooks will be prolonged and their efficiency will be improved. Yes, that’s right; we are talking about Windows 7, the OS which we consider it’s the greenest of them all. And here’s why.

When the new system is in the phase of resting, it saves more energy than its predecessors, thanks to the intelligent way of reducing and, when possible, eliminating the background activity of the system. Those processes that cannot be shut down run separately so that even then energy is reduced.

In Vista, even in the previous operating systems, when the system is boot-up, millions of small processes and services are initialized and run constantly in the background, no matter if they are needed for the system at that particular time or not. In Windows 7, things are slightly different. Now, only the most crucial processes and services that are needed for proper running of the OS are initialized. The others are in a stand-by mode, but not active. If the need arise, that is, if the user or a process needs a program in order to finish an operation, the stand-by processes will initialize and work only when they are needed.

Another way of efficient reduction of energy is the way the new operating system is reading the set of registers. For this operation a considerably lower reading is needed from the hard disk. This, of course, also reduces the energy.

Also, the way Windows 7 responds with the other applications has been changed. If you don’t work in the OS for a certain period of time, it will go into the sleep mode. It will make little difference if some materials were downloading from another user on the network or if the CPU was being used by an application that runs certain task at that time. This is particularly useful with notebooks; they shut down the screen and the system is using minimal resources until you specifically ask for something. That’s why Windows 7 may turn out to be the best operating system for the notebooks. These accessible and low in price computers with advanced features have become more and more popular lately. And why shouldn’t they?

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Tags: application, cpu, netbook, notebook, power management, sleep mode, windows 7, windows vista