Core Duo Power Sapping Bug is Microsoft Issue 109
illusoryphoenix writes "A few weeks ago, Tom's Hardware noted a significant reduction in battery life of the Core Duo processors it tested when USB devices were inserted. Intel claimed that Microsoft had a bug in their USB drivers, while Tom's Hardware was unable to reproduce the same result for any of the other Pentium M microarchitecures. This issue has finally been publicly confirmed by Microsoft to be a USB driver problem which keeps the processor from entering advanced sleep states."
This is good news (Score:4, Insightful)
At least we know someones QA is still working.. ( and that wouldnt be microsoft in this case )
Re:This is good news (Score:3, Insightful)
BIOS Fix? (Score:4, Insightful)
What! Microsift to patch the BIOS
Not on my notebook
Re:BIOS Fix? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Microsoft can easily patch their own friggin' registry monstrosity.
Patching the BIOS of the machine is an outrageously bad suggestion, and a bad precedent.
How long before MS patches everyone's BIOS into oblivion or DRM hell?
Re:This is good news (Score:3, Insightful)
Good news for whom?
I agree that it's certainly good for people unfortunate enough to use Microsoft's operating systems - they'll be able to fix a problem with a software patch rather then a hardware patch.
However, it's certainly not good news for microsoft - the small amount of trust that people have left in MS's QA processes will be lost in the news that they found this bug over six months ago, but didn't bother releasing a patch until it was publicised. (I hope their security QA processes are better)
All a bunch of whiners.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Special sleep states (Score:2, Insightful)
*deep and sinister buzzing sounds comming from the harddrive*
But seriously - if there's one thing I really miss, now that i've been using 99% linux for over 1½ year, it's proper power management features. I've tried a few distros and none of them delivered 100% working power management, such as standby.
I did, however, manage to get hibernation up and running, but apparently the docs on softwaresuspend aren't perfect, and I did manage to be able to hibernate - with the regular nv driver - but the properit...y.. (sorry for my bad english) nvidia driver has some problems with sleep states, making it impossible to stand by using xorg and that driver.
So to conclude: I love Linux and the freedom I get, but I do miss the "works out-of-the-box" power management features of Windows >=2000.
Re:This is good news (Score:4, Insightful)
In my experience, code reviews only pick up the reasonably obvious problems - your example was an obvious problem that could be spotted a mile off. Code reviews generally don't tend to pick up problems in intricate algorithms.
Infact, looking at the user agent string _at all_ is a bug, nomatter what string you're looking for. It is the reason that browsers have to fake their UA strings (IE claims to be Mozilla, Opera often claims to be IE, etc) - if you check UA strings then you have to update the site every time a new browser is released. On the other hand, presumably your UA test was to serve up some specific code needed to work around browser bugs - that makes detecting a later version of the browser and serving up the same code to be an invalid thing to do since that later version which hasn't yet been released may not have the same bugs so you're suddenly serving up workarounds that aren't needed and may potentially break.
That said, as other people pointed out, whilest MS didn't originally spot this bug (whcih may or may not be a problem with their QA procedures), they _did_ spot it over 6 months ago and didn't bother to fix it - that's the bigger problem. I wouldn't complain too much since under existing hardware this didn't affect people much - the real problem is that they also take this attitude with security bugs, and that's more worrying (only fix the bug when it has public attention... usually coz it's being exploited in the wild)