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• Battery Life Of course, no review of a netbook platform is complete without a look at battery life, especially if we’re interested in the differences between OS versions. However, we shouldn’t forget that we’re still dealing with a release candidate of Windows 7, which means that both the operating system itself and its drivers are still very much works in progress. As previously mentioned, we decided to run our tests using the latest Intel drivers for Windows Vista. It is possible and even likely that native Windows 7 drivers will allow for longer battery life. We certainly hope so, since Windows 7 looks decidedly bad in this discipline. Idle runtime, simulated with Battery Eater’s Reader test, is shortened by 2.5 hours by moving to the newer OS. That’s unacceptable for a mobile platform. Cinebench R10 We begin our benchmark analysis with Cinebench. Its CPU test determines the processing power of the CPU and puts as many cores to work in the x-Core run as are available. In the case of Intel’s Atom processor, that means that it uses the two threads provided by Hyper-Threading. Scores are nearly identical across the two OS versions. As the name implies, the OpenGL test focuses on graphics performance. This is where we initially stumbled across the lackluster performance resulting from Microsoft’s drivers, which lagged behind with a two-digit score. Switching to Intel’s latest Vista driver boosted performance almost tenfold, but Win 7 still couldn’t catch up with XP. PCMark 05 PCMark 2005 clearly favors Windows XP. The more modern operating system is unable to best its eight year old predecessor in even a single subtest, although results are sometimes quite close. Graphics and hard drive performance show the largest performance deltas. Again, all we can say is that more optimized drivers should improve performance to some extent, providing Intel invests the time and actually releases them.

• So, now we know that shifting from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is no alchemy for cutting battery use. But in an effort to further-quantify the difference between the Calpella and Montevina platforms, I plotted them both on the same chart under Windows 7. For all the talk of extensive power gating throughout the Clarksfield die, it’s hard to get past the bottom line: Clarksfield is a more power-hungry processor, regardless of whether you’re at idle or under load. Just follow the peaks and valleys here—at every point, mobile Core i7 is sucking down more juice than its predecessor. Now, we pushed this story back for more than a week as we worked with Intel to explain the power results (after all, a number of other sites have already reported power numbers at idle and under load suggesting that Clarksfield uses less power). Intel’s very valid concern is that our test platform sports a power-hungry graphics module, so any gains related to Clarksfield’s architecture are muffled by G92’s demands. Eurocom, the company who built both of our test platforms, astutely counters that these are desktop replacement notebooks; they’re not intended to be five-hour mobile machines. If the lesson of balanced system building has taught us anything, though, it’s that you want to complement high-end CPUs with plenty of memory, a capable I/O subsystem, and respectable graphics—especially if you’re pegging the platform to the high-end/enthusiast market. More Power Testing We expected both machines to finish this test faster thanks to Windows 7’s more aggressive P-state promotion policies, but it was a little more surprising to see them finish up at roughly the same time. Of course, none of the preceding three charts really relate to battery life or run time. So, I also took a few other measurements. The first was idle on the Windows 7 desktop, where our mobile Core 2 Extreme pulled 40.7W compared to the Core i7’s 54.7W. That was with a battery. You have to bear in mind that with charge running to the battery, power draw will increase, unrelated to the platform’s actual needs. Pulling the battery out to gauge pure power draw yielded a 45W Core i7 and 34W Core 2 Extreme. This is still higher than what Intel expected Clarksfield to be running at, but Eurocom confirmed this was in line with expectations. Minutes of DVD Playback Before Auto-Shutdown in Windows 7MinMin/AhCore i7-920XM (Cougar)4411.5Core 2 Extreme QX9300 (Montebello)9220.9 Then I took a reading with the opening chapter of 300 playing (hardware acceleration enabled), and found the Core 2 Extreme at 50W to the Core i7’s 62W. Next, I completely charged both notebooks and let them play through as much of the movie as possible before being automatically shut down at 7% battery life. The mobile Core i7 lasted 44 minutes to the Core 2 Extreme’s one hour and 32 minutes (neither long enough to last for a full movie). That’s only part of the story—the i7’s battery holds 3,800 mAh of charge, while the Core 2’s holds 4,400 mAh. If you divide that out into minutes of DVD playback per unit of charge, Core i7 delivers 11.5 min/Ah, while the Core 2 Extreme enables 20.9 min/Ah.

• At first glance, one might come away from our benchmarks with the impression that Windows 7 is just as slow as Vista and that nothing much has really changed. However, looking only at the benchmarks doesn’t give you the full picture either. Subjectively, the release candidate feels quite snappy. Even with only 1 GB of RAM installed, the pronounced slowdowns that plague Vista on the netbook platform were extremely rare. So unlike Vista, Windows 7 may very well develop into an alternative to XP for netbook hardware. After all, performance isn’t exactly the primary concern of this platform, although newer and more optimized drivers should give it a boost. We are a lot more critical of battery life under Microsoft’s newest OS. Even with its huge 59 Wh battery, Windows 7 shuts off much sooner than XP. This is beyond disappointing, since a newer OS should come with better and more refined power saving mechanisms than its eight year old predecessor. Then again, they won’t do any good if there aren’t any drivers to take advantage of them. See a pattern here? This is where Windows 7 currently falls short. Microsoft and the hardware vendors have their work cut out for them. We can only hope that Intel won’t only release optimized drivers for its “revamped” Atom platform based on the GN40 chipset, but will also provide newer versions for the aging 945G chipset found in the majority of netbooks in stores today. Aside from that, Windows 7 provides a much more pleasant user experience on a netbook than Vista ever did. While its updated user interface adds several new features, Microsoft has also made many changes under the hood that aren’t as visible to the user. Where functionality and feature set are concerned, the new version has the upper hand anyway, if not now, then in the future. At some point, newer technologies will no longer be made available for Windows XP via patchs, hacks, or service packs. Also, since Microsoft has already terminated mainstream support, companies are less and less likely to provide drivers for new products that work with the aging OS. Like it or not, the future belongs to Windows 7. Hopefully, IHVs share this view and will provide newer drivers even for older hardware. If you’re interested in trying the release candidate of Windows 7 for yourself, you can download it for free directly from Microsoft after registering. A word of warning: we don’t recommend pulling Win 7 RC1 from P2P sites, as several versions have been shown to be infected with viruses and malware.