I really don’t know what’s the deal with Aero.

I’ve got a friend who’s running Home Premium which has Aero. We practically have the same laptop specs and expected battery life and yet, she only gets a measly hour and a half or so in battery mode while I get 2 or so hours, 3 tops. The difference? I’m running Home Basic with options set to performance (so it looks like a Windows 98 with the Classic Menu) and she’s running Aero.

A bit of Googling let me to this ZDNet article citing that Aero really sucks the life out of batteries. It’s a shame, really. Laptop batteries aren’t getting any revolutionary upgrades yet and it’s really up to manufacturers to tweak power consumption profiles to get an optimal battery life. Vista should’ve done that but not with Aero.

Microsoft made some important changes in Vista that do improve some aspects of battery life, such as smarter hibernation modes that override applications that want to keep running, and simpler options for choosing a power management setting. But laptop users who spent extra money on powerful laptops to handle the graphics requirements of Vista and the Aero interface are forced to run the aesthetic equivalent of Vista Basic, the low-cost version of Vista, if they care about battery life.

I’ve bought the laptop with considerable specs (could even run Aero) but Aero’s the least of my concerns. I wanted solid specs for application responsiveness. Who needs a bloated interface anyway? I should’ve bought me a Mac if I wanted that (and yes, better performance in general too).