Software help desk

Since Windows 7′s final release last fall, some testers have been reporting that dual-boot network computers seem to consume power more efficiently running Windows XP than Windows 7. One example came last October from JKOnTheRun’s Kevin C. Tofel, who saw his own Toshiba notebook battery die 45 minutes sooner running Win7 than Windows XP. But even then, Tofel was skeptical of a few curious facts, including that Toshiba changed its power management utilities.Since 1999, the system that has reported battery capacity and relative power levels to the operating system has been the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), developed by industry leaders such as Intel, Phoenix Technologies, and Toshiba. But ACPI was developed with the BIOS in mind; and as PC architecture evolves, as even Phoenix will readily concede, the conventional BIOS is becoming an historical remnant.

And history has also shown that as a lithium-ion battery degrades, its capability to report its own health degrades with it. Only now have batteries become capable of reporting their capacity how much charge they can hold as compared to their manufacturers’ specifications.Recently, some Windows 7 users have become acquainted with a new “feature” of the operating system an advisory where the operating system suggests it might be time for users to replace their batteries.

That started feeding into reports that Windows 7 was degrading batteries faster than its predecessors, such as this from InformationWeek that cites members of Microsoft’s support forums.

That helped feed stories that the operating system was “tarnished” by a battery plague.

The instigator of these complaints appears to be the advisory itself, which users may be interpreting as an indicator that Windows 7 has “eaten” their battery. In fact, as Microsoft Windows division president Steven Sinofsky told users today in a post to the Engineering Windows 7 blog, Win7 is merely reporting a fact of everyday life, whose information had not yet been standardized in the days of Vista.

“PC batteries expose information about battery capacity and health through the system firmware (or BIOS). There is a detailed specification for the firmware interface (ACPI), but at the most basic level, the hardware platform and firmware provide a number of read-only fields that describe the battery and its status,” Sinofsky writes. “The firmware provides information on the battery including manufacturer, serial number, design capacity and last full charge capacity.

The last two pieces of information design capacity and last full charge capacity are the information Windows 7 uses to determine how much the battery has naturally degraded. This information is read-only and there is no way for Windows 7 or any other OS to write, set, or configure battery status information.

my gpu is showing a higher temprature than it is the sensor is currently showing that my Nvidia Geforce 7000m on my acer aspire 5520 is running at 115c (which is the throttle temprature) but it was showing higher (i actually put it in the freezer i know how bad an idea that was) but even after being in a -1f freezer for 3 hours it showed being 95c even tho the cpu and hdd sensors showed 40c... this is under ubuntu with the sensor applet... vista is unbootable becouse the gpu sensor shows it too hot and shuts the pc off... is there a way to calabrate/disable/repair the sensor? cause its out of warenty crawled through the bios... it was designed for a less techincal use as the options for doing anything relateing to my problem doesnt exisit but i know it must have aces to it becouse it shuts off when the sensor reaches a sertan point

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