Yup, that’s right.. Windows 7 does shorten the battery life of netbooks. This has been proven by a few tests done by Laptop Magazine, Liliputing, and jkOntherun respectively.
In Laptop Magazine’s test, they make use of 3 of the most popular netbooks on the market: the Toshiba Mini NB205, Asus Eee PC 1008HA, and HP Mini 311 netbook, and compare the battery life of each netbooks running on Windows XP and Windows 7. The result indicates that on average netbooks get 47 minutes less battery life on Windows 7. Liliputing and jkOnTheRun have run their own tests which invariably reached the same conclusion. Additionally, jkOntherun notes that “using Windows 7 with all of the advanced Aero features off not only makes your netbook look like a Windows 95 beta, it doesn’t help run time in any noticeable way”.
Hopefully, future driver updates and Microsoft’s fine-tuning on Windows 7 will yield longer runtimes on netbook.
