Longer Battery Life, Faster Boot Times with Windows 7

This year's edition of WinHEC, which has already demonstrated Windows 7's digital goodness with Device Stage, has more good news about Microsoft's next desktop operating system:

• Longer battery life
• Faster boot times

As Maximum PC.com readers know, better hardware support has been a major goal of Windows 7 right from the start, and it looks as if Windows 7, even in its pre-beta stage, is making impressive strides.

Engadget has posted a video from WinHEC that shows a Windows 7 machine providing energy savings equivalent to an extra hour of DVD playback: you won't have to worry about running out of power before the movie ends, and you'll even have enough juice for a special feature or two.

WinHEC also featured Microsoft exec Jon DeVaan, the Senior Vice President in charge of Core Operating System Division, performing a "boot drag race" pitting identical machines running Windows 7 and Windows Vista: Windows 7 won by several seconds. It's part of DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky's keynote address, which you can see at the WinHEC virtual pressroom.

It isn't just Microsofties at WinHEC who are noticing the improvement in battery life; at jkOnTheRun, blogger Kevin Tofel put Windows 7 to work on two systems:

I have Windows 7 on the MSI Wind and also installed it on my Samsung Q1UP last night and there is a noticable difference in terms of run-time. I can't put exact numbers on it just yet and in fairness, it's probably not appropriate since this is a very early test build, but it's looking good so far for mobile devices.

Meanwhile, Lifehacker's Gina Trapani pitted Windows 7 against both Windows Vista and Windows XP on her triple-boot PC: a 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. Even with Windows 7 running on a slower PATA (IDE) hard disk than Windows Vista and XP (which are booting from an SATA hard disk), Windows 7 ties with Windows XP and both beat Windows Vista by 20% (measured from the operating system menu to the login screen).
 
Keep in mind that Windows 7 is still a pre-beta, so this level of performance should continue to improve.

If you're using Windows 7, are you noticing similar improvements? Hit the Comments button and give us the details.