Faulty Microsoft Driver Saps Intel Core Duo power 268
Critical_ writes "Tom's Hardware recently discovered a bug in Microsoft's ACPI driver implementation under Windows XP SP2 that causes a loss of more than one hour of battery time when connecting any USB 2.0 device to an Intel Core Duo based system. Apparently Microsoft, Intel and ODMs have known of this problem under a confidentiality agreement since July 12, 2005 via (a still private) Knowledge Base article KB899179. The bug lies in the asynchronous scheduler component inadvertently being left running causing Windows' internal task scheduler (ITS) to treat it as a running process involving the attached device. This in turn prevents the ITS from powering down the processor into one of the ACPI sleep states causing the system to use more battery power. At this time there seems to be no fix. Strangely, single-core systems and AMD systems are not affected. This leads one to wonder if it is truely a software problem or if there a much larger hardware problem that may affect Core Duo equipped Apple systems."
confidentiality agreement (Score:5, Interesting)
Isnt this a basis for a class action fraud suit? If not, it should be investigated by the SEC at least.
AMD Looking Good (Score:2, Interesting)
Yet another reason to buy AMD. I dumped Intel back when I had a brandnew Celeron 400 and have never looked back. I see a class action lawsuit in the future :)
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]Re:This is great news. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yawn, non free sucks. (Score:3, Interesting)
Critical_ sees a typical Wintel bug and thinks Apple has a problem. It's an interesting thought, but not one to publish without checking.
APM [wikipedia.org] and ACPI, designed in part by Microsoft [wikipedia.org], have always been secretive and buggy. Tricky hardware that constantly varies like Winmodems is the rule and I'm amazed the Linux works so well with any of it.
The only thing worse than the hardware has been Microsoft's software on top of it. While I'm able to keep laptops up for more then 40 days by using APM and hibernation or ACPI and suspend, my Microsoft using friends have to reboot. They tell me that their Word documents get corrupted on resume if the machine resumes at all. Cluster on cluster, all of their complex nasties designed to thwart competitors only bite them in the rear despite the fact they wrote the specs themselves and have hardware details no one else does. This is what to expect from non-free.
IBM cell based hardware running GNU/Linux is going to blow all of this trash into a distantly remembered nightmare.
The problem includes AMD64... (Score:2, Interesting)
I normally run plugged into power with music playing so I didn't think much about it, other than noting it being weird.
right now the fan is running at full tilt. and has been for hours. even when the system is 99% idle. the ambient temp is about 70F. the computer is cool to the touch everywhere.
I unplugged my ipod shuffle.
the fan went into halfspeed mode about 5 seconds later.
it's about 2 minutes later and it still hasn't stepped down to lowspeed fan. but even this is an improvement.
Re:Kinda First Post (Score:4, Interesting)
Could you repeat the expiriment running Knoppix [knoppix.org] and report back to us.
More seriously though, Tom's Hardware should repeat the experiment with a Linux distro that is notebook friendly and has a SMP kernal.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
That would not be a problem for Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
Given that ACPI barely works on it and is very buggy, therefore most people usually avoid doing anything fancy such as configuring power saving functionalities...
Re:Yawn, non free sucks. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll answer your question with one of my own; how often does Microsoft get a patch out of the door early, let alone "on time"? Why are there still bugs in Windows which were originally exposed over 3 years ago which haven't been fixed, when they're getting ready to release another version of Windows based on that exact same code?
Why are single core systems not affected by the same driver?
Because the driver sucks at dual core systems?
Could this issue affect Linux or Mac OSX users on those platforms?
It's a possibility, but adding it to the end of your article is called "flaming". It's a baseless accusation which you either placed their to bash Apple computers, when you have absolutely no proof or evidence to suggest they would be affected by this. If you said "This is definitively what caused the MacBook to be delayed, here's a link to some evidence", I would have probably agreed with you, but sadly, you have done nothing of the like, because nothing of the like currently exists to say that it happened that way. Thus, if I had the ability to mod this article, "Flamebait" is the only choice I'd have, until the anti-Apple remark was removed.
Bashing one company for another's gross incompetance isn't fair, is it?