Boot Camp 4.0 / Windows 7 heat issues

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Boot Camp 4.0 / Windows 7 heat issues

I installed Boot Camp and Windows 7 yesterday and noticed that my Macbook runs much hotter under Windows. I used my Kill-A-Watt to measure power consumption and found some interesting results:

Running a clean OSX Lion: ~15 watts idle after boot, ~23 watts playing a full screen HD video using vlc.

Case feels cool to the touch.

Running a clean Windows 7: ~38 watts idle after boot, ~44 watts playing the same video using vlc.

Case upper left region feels hot.

By clean I mean a new install with no added startups. There appears to be a serious issue here, perhaps the cpu/gpu power is not being stepped down.

My setup:

Macbook Pro late 2009 2.66GHz

OSX Lion w/ latest updates

Windows 7 x64 Ultimate w/ latest updates

Boot Camp 4.0 (or 4.0.1; latest as of yesterday)

Boot Camp-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Mar 2, 2012 4:30 PM

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Answer 1

The hatter

Level 9

61,031 points

Mar 2, 2012 5:31 PM in response to bpepper

Early reviews of Windows 8 Customer Preview is it has much better longer battery life and other features.

Windows on Mac does not have the thermal fan control active or as well. So it will run hot.

I'd be curious of same kind of tests you did with someone running 8CP, and 8 definitely runs better/smoother.

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Answer 2

Csound1

Level 9

60,063 points

Mar 2, 2012 5:43 PM in response to The hatter

The hatter wrote:

Early reviews of Windows 8 Customer Preview is it has much better longer battery life and other features.

Windows on Mac does not have the thermal fan control active or as well. So it will run hot.

I'd be curious of same kind of tests you did with someone running 8CP, and 8 definitely runs better/smoother.

Better than what? Longer than what?

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