Wondering about turning a 2730P into a 2735P....

Yes, I suspect that as the hardware in the 2730P was nearing its intended end of life with the onset of the 2740P, the drivers were not rigorously updated by the hardware manufacturers beyond basic functionality. The Vista drivers were mature and working well, even if the OS was more of a hog than 7.

The puzzling thing is that the bulk of the hardware in the 2740P is the same as the 2730P except for one main item; the core chipset of the motherboard.

My gut feeling is that the Intel chipset, processor, and memory access systems are not running as efficient as they could be under 7 on the 2730P since not as much work was done to get them driven properly. The drivers were optimized for XP and Vista.

Now my little Fujitsu P1620 is just the opposite! I used to get about 4 hours on XPTE, Vista was hopeless and wouldn't even run so I never ran it long enough to figure out what the battery life was (1.2 GHZ core solo, 1 GB RAM), and Win 7 delivers 5.5 hours of battery! Pretty impressive. Why would it work so well with Win 7 when it is old architecture as well? Consider the effort taken to get netbooks working well with 7...same simple architecture.

Dan

 

Got interested and did some tests with battery life. I ran the test after clean installing each OS , loading Word 2007 and installing the various drivers/updating them.

All tests were run 3 times from 100% total life to 0% where the PC shut itself down from lack of power and the results were averaged or roughed whilst using Word 2010, internet off, brightness at 80%, and using slate mode only.


XPTE got 10 hours, interesting tablet input panel that was... kind of cumbersome due to not being able to use the eraser (XP recognized it as a pen)

Vista got around 11~12 hours. TIP felt better actually...probably being able to use the eraser.

W7 got a whopping 9 ~ 10 hours TIP felt even better and actually helpful.

All situations and timing of events (taking a break or eating) were nearly identical and the power settings were stock and the only modified setting was keeping the computer on with no screen saver.

I "might" go back to Vista just for a balance between battery life and improved TIP

 

Thank you for doing some thorough testing with actual results. When I read the posts of the estimated times from the power management programs my first thought was, "Has anyone actually timed it to see if the software is reading correctly?" Trust but verify.

The way I read it, your results are showing a 10%~15% difference rather than the 50% difference the software is claiming. I find that more believable and within the margin of error for architecture differences.

 

The "50%" and the like by companies most of the time is exaggerated by external means (controlled environments, optimal settings, etc. etc.), so i don't usually go for those. I just go with my hunch....

after reading product specs and its architecture, never for the eye candy.