Core Duo Power Sapping Bug is Microsoft Issue

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."

So predictable.

[twitter]

Good thing no one made the Critical error of speciously faulting Apple or Linux without testing [slashdot.org], that would look like FUD when faced with a typical Microsoft problem.

Re:anandtech test

[deong]

"And this is why Tom's and other tech review sites should always test it with, say, Linux in addition to Windows. They'd have known a lot sooner."

Funny. In my own independent testing, the Windows USB driver provides about a 30% gain in battery life using Linux as my baseline.

Re:Oh My God!

[cnettel]

One could argue that keeping USB2 devices plugged for long in a laptop running on battery is a kind of new scenario. The issue is also aggrevated on a dual core machine, as the need for "deep sleep" on one of the cores is actually a quite common scenario there, whereas the effects on a single-core older Pentium M is less pronounced (especially if you're using the system for anything, like playing a MP3, which will prevent your system from going to that level of power saving most of the time anyway).