Windows 7 Battery Woes Completely Disproved

From Paul Thurrott (SuperSite for Windows) 09/02/10:

Microsoft on Monday issued a lengthy statement about the recent Windows 7 battery controversy, echoing my assessment from earlier in the day but backing it up with cold, hard evidence. Put simply, Windows 7 is not responsible for any battery life issues that customers have reported via its support forums.

"Windows 7 is correctly warning [about] batteries that are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state," Microsoft president Steven Sinofsky wrote in the Engineering Windows 7 Blog. "We are seeing nothing more than the normal course of battery degradation over time ... In every case we have been able to identify the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement."

I can’t say I’ve noticed any negative effects with using Windows 7 on a laptop (that previously ran XP) battery-related or otherwise. I’m still rather in awe of the fact I’ve successfully installed Windows 7 on my 5 year old Sony Vaio laptop and seems to run it as well as it well as it did XP.  I run Windows 7 across all of my PCs now and have absolutely no complaints.  On my laptop, the battery life certainly seems comparable with what I was getting under XP.

That this story grew so big in the first place is a testimony to people’s naiveté coupled with a truck-load of scaremongering.