Ballmer deploys greenery in CeBIT charm offensive

On his first trip to CeBIT in six years, Steve Ballmer is hoping to fix up Microsoft's somewhat tarnished image in Europe. Tonight, he's at the official CeBIT opening ceremony along with European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and German chancellor Angela Merkel. Rumour has it he'll …

[Jon]

33% less power??? what, in sleep mode?

I'm pretty sure he made all of that up. I run vista at work, it continously taxes the hard drive and CPU (even with 2gb of memory) no matter what you are doing.

[Herby]

Idle power 33% less

If Vista's idle power is 33% less I suppose that is good, the problem is that Vista has no idle time, so it probably makes little difference. One needs to compare TOTAL power requirements to really make a difference. Then again doesn't everyone know that?

I am reminded of a computer company that optimized the idle loop because it used quite a few of the available cycles. The computer did nothing very efficiently!

[Ishkandar]

WOW !!

Microsoft discovered cluster-computing !! Whatever will anyone think of next ??

Mine has the logo "Oracle V6.2 for DEC clusters"

[Paul Crolla]

33 times less power than XP

Is that because it works 33 times less than XP?

[Morely Dotes]

@ Mr. Ballmer

"We have formed an entire group at Microsoft to drive our product to be more suitable for scientific research."

A good first step would be to ensure that it does maths correctly, and always displays the actual result.

When Excel can do that, then perhaps it will be useful for science.

[Charles Manning]

My first PC had a 100W power supply

no CPU heat sink, fan etc - just the fan in the power supply. It booted in about 15 seconds (MSDOS).

I'm so happy for the environment that those wasteful days are behind us!

</sarcasm>

The part that I find so appalling is that Ballmer and Gates say such outlandish stuff and think the world is stupid enough to believe them. Gates: We invented open source. Gates: Google would be nothing without us. Ballmer: developers, developers,... and other slapstick monlkeyboy stuff. Ballmer: The new greenness.

Surely MS can afford a reasonable PR crew to put less daft words Ballmer's mouth.

[Arse Face]

agree with Jon

as mentioned in another post, i've just put vista onto a p4, with 2 gig. Now the hard disk is constantly on the move, whereas in XP, it would boot up, and sit idle until I told it to do something....

I use a UPS, which monitors how much power it supplies to the P.C. Pre-Vista, it would idle at 89/90w. Post-vista its never below 93w. Negligible difference, but hardly the '33% more efficient' i'd be hoping for. I'm guessing that the additional 3 watts are being used by the constantly harrassed hard disk. Which happens to be Fujitsu. Wonder how long that will take to pop.

Charles... and i bet that was an old AT supply, with a proper 'ON/OFF' switch. Which you KNEW was completely cutting the mains off from the PSU.

[James]

Not 33% less....

The article actually reads "he claimed that Vista's idle mode consumes 33 times less power than XP's"

If my calculations are correct that means it consumes about 3% what XP does in idle mode. This is a staggering level - must mean that the power supply effectively switches off.

Great stuff - keep it up Stevie. We'll soon have PCs that consume almost no power (hey - we could call them IBM PCs and run them with 60 Watt power supplies!!).

[Turgut Kalfaoglu]

vista

Perhaps the best way to save power on vista is to never turn it off - or to reformat it to a more efficient operating system -- like linux.

[DR]

power saving over XP

mostly because they buggered up powersaving hibernation and idle modes in XP.

great, so what they mean to say is they've fixed bugs that shuld never have been there in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

@James

I think your are right you can save with Vista so much energy only when vista is idle because vista is only idle when the machine is turned off.