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>Most problems with Windows laptops aren't Intel's fault, IMO.

Intel works very thoroughly with Microsoft, and it is absolutely on Intel for bringing forth the most inexcusable failure mode: Laptops "sleeping" with the CPU still on and proceeding to cook themselves in your backpack because they thought they were still on mains power.

Why is this on Intel? Because they removed a C-state that actually slept properly in favor of a C-state that theoretically saved more power but in practice almost never works with how people actually use laptops.

AMD might also share the blame here. I don't know, because I don't care to know further with how stupid everything is.

Agree on the sleep state stuff. idk who's fault it really is, but at least on the software front I mostly blame microsoft, because it's really their duty to deliver consistent, reliable power consumption on battery power.

Everyone involved does a pretty poor job imo.

The processors/chipsets seem to do what they're they're supposed to. However, it's far too easy for other parties to create a scenario that prevents the system from reaching deeper c-states.

Motherboards manufacturers produce boards that can't go below C3, despite showing up to C10 in the bios. The actual level of support won't ever be mentioned.

PCI devices, e.g. wifi cards, can prevent the system from reaching deeper C states entirely.

Putting devices into a PCI slot connected to the CPU lanes rather than the PCH can also prevent the system reaching the desired states. The CPU slot will frequently be the only choice.

Operating system defaults often prevent the system from reaching deeper c-states. Linux has been worse for this than Microsoft in my experience.

Anecdata here but I bought a thinkpad T14 in 2022. My colleague bought the same at the same time. We both have identical machines except for me opting for an intel processor and him picking an AMD. My laptop has heating issues and terrible battery life. His lasts an entire day and no heating issues. Forums research shows others in the same timeframe are facing the same issue as me so it is entirely Intel related.

I'd still be more inclined to blame a software issue. Do you have the exact same software installed on both?

Yes. I have bare minimum s/w on the windows 11 that came with it.

> My experience with my laptops is that windows will arbitrarily use 2-3x idle power draw while on battery for no apparent reason.

Preinstalled bloatware is a massive problem for the average consumer. My partner is constantly surprised how well windows runs on the computers we have in our house - she’s so used to windows computers running all sorts of crap all the time. Our media box is just bare windows, but with all the obnoxious stuff disabled. (Like start menu news items, game bar, telemetry and all that).

Most work computers running windows come with antivirus and rootkits like crowdstrike. And personal computers are usually even worse. I bought a brand new HP machine a few years ago which idled at about 15% cpu usage, even on battery. It got hot and ran itself flat in no time, just sitting there. Turns out it was running some bloatware hp audio noise cancellation plugin or something all the time, even when the microphone wasn’t in use.

Modern computers are crazy fast. But there’s not much power left over if you install clown car of crap on them.

The day I lost all faith in Windows was the day when one of their top guys said that dual-core CPUs will be great because they will be able to offload antivirus software to a core while users use the remaining core for using their computers.

No words on increasing security and reducing the attack surface of Windows. Just tuck that antivirus there, keeping the status quo while ripping users of the benefits of increased processing power.

> There is no reason for a CPU to be running higher than idle the vast majority of the time in a laptop, for tasks that you would be using a laptop for on battery.

True. I once got suspicious and opened the process list window. I had installed a server so I could stream to my Roku device, and I wasn't streaming, yet the server was sucking up quite a bit of compute time, all the time.

I uninstalled it.

I've bought i7 machines whenever I bought a new machine with my own money (so have my employers) but I've had various i3 and i5 desktops come into my possession and always been disappointed by limitations baked in. For instance I was hoping to install Steam & Proton on an i3 machine for entry level gaming but found it wouldn't talk to a 1030 card I had laying around.

On paper it looks like Intel machines from 2010-2020 have sufficient I/O bandwidth but when you look at the artificial restrictions Intel puts on i3 and i5 machines (unless you get some special motherboard with PCIe switches) it's best to assume that you won't be able to "get there from here" and that many seemingly reasonable configurations of on-board peripherals and add-on peripherals "just won't work."

It reminds me of the hassle it was to get expansion cards to work in the day of the "PC compatibles" that used the ISA and other early busses: back then you had to mess with jumper cables and which card went in what slot to resolve IRQ conflicts. It was well documented, PC builders all knew it, and I was always able to get it to work.

In the PCIe age though I have often been running into undocumented or poorly documented limits, PC builders who are totally ignorant of this (they always buy i7 and/or high end motherboards I guess.), etc.

Related to that in my mind is the equally obscure situation with USB 3 which is the laptops I've had have all had undocumented limits on how many USB devices you can plug in. In the USB 1 era it was documented that you could plug in 127 devices into a USB tree, the USB 3 doc doesn't guarantee anything! You would think you could plug your laptop into one or two USB 3 hubs with a lot of ports but my experience is that I'd start having trouble when I had 4-5 devices plugged in, then I plug in a mouse and either the sound card or a mass storage device gets unmounted.

> For instance I was hoping to install Steam & Proton on an i3 machine for entry level gaming but found it wouldn't talk to a 1030 card I had laying around.

this is absolutely a skill issue, there is no limitations about plugging anything into an i3 and in fact i3s are popular industrial processors and SOHO servers since they support ecc during the skylake era.

the rest of your comment all springs from the apparent issues you had installing a pcie card and doesn’t really say anything once that point is dismissed.

> My experience with my laptops is that windows will arbitrarily use 2-3x idle power draw while on battery for no apparent reason

same with my experience. My computer have a hardware issue recently, so I am on steamdeck. When I am on windows, the whole system stays on 50%+ load even I only have browser and discord opened. Playing games on it is so laggy that can't even hit 50 fps stably. But the same setup somehow works completely 60fps stable on steamos even it is literally the same hardware.

Windows is really optimized so badly for low power hardwares.

And battery life with most laptops (even the Framework) is pretty horrible on Linux compared to Windows without excessive tweaking (and even then).

Windows sleep mode is power hungry since the introduction of Modern Standby that allow for network connections even during sleep mode.

> will arbitrarily use 2-3x idle power draw while on battery for no apparent reason

You might be thinking about Linux? IIRC OS X wasn't particularly impressive about that back in the x86 days and high-end Macs had horrible battery life.

No, this is Windows. It absolutely can use minimal power, but my experience closely monitoring my laptops consumption is it will regularly spike from 5-6w to 15-20w for extended periods, which obviously obliterates battery life. I've been unable to figure out why.

My particular specimen came with a 97wh battery (XPS), so it would be able to linger on for ~10+hrs if it could maintain its idle power consumption with brief spikes to do work, but in reality it's basically always less than that in my experience (and worse, its inconsistent as hell about it).

The other issue is sleep states, which as another commenter mentions leads to laptops using all of their battery in your backpack so it's dead by the time you actually try to use it :'(

It's made worse by comparison to modern phones, which deliver reliable, consistent power consumption throughout the day - so a laptop that regularly lasts a fraction of the time and doesn't know how to sleep just looks awful by comparison.

I don’t think I have ever had a Windows laptop last 10 hours without a consistent effort to keep it in low power modes, keeping screen brightness as low as I can, and actively keeping the number of running processes and background programs as low as I can.

Sure 10-15 years ago, we were lucky to get 3-4 hours of battery life so getting 8-9 is great but they advertise these things as having upwards of 20 hours.

Linux not coming close to that is “acceptable” because they aren’t advertising it constantly as the reason you need to buy the latest laptop or get onto Windows 11. Apple is more honest in this regard and it really is the vertical integration that allows them to control the entire system.