Emailing "A Leaner, Greener Windows 7"
Vista, though pretty and chock full o' power management features, was a tad bloated. With
Windows 7, however, Microsoft is hoping that users will appreciate it's leaner underpinnings and cloud-tastic hooks to the company's Live services.
But one overlooked aspect is how the OS makes is possible to run less power-hungry apps. Here's a snippet out of the Windows 7 Developer Guide provided by Microsoft.
Extended operation on battery power and the use of energy efficient technologies are key requirements for today’s developers. Windows 7 greatly reduces the number of activities that the operating system performs that prevent use of power-saving modes. It also supports the trigger-starting of system services to enable processors to become idle more often and stay idle longer, which decreases power consumption. In addition, Windows 7 takes advantage of the latest energy-efficient hardware, including network adapters, storage devices, and graphics cards.
Windows 7 provides the infrastructure and tools that make it easy for developers to determine the energy impact of their applications. A set of event callbacks enable applications to reduce their activity when the system is on battery power and automatically scale up when the system is on AC power. For applications that involve a background process or service, Windows 7 features new infrastructure to automatically enable background tasks when most appropriate in order to maximize energy efficiency.
Intriguing, but why not let Mark Russinovich describe some of Windows 7 power-saving features? In this
Channel 9 video, Russinovich explains (around the 19:45 mark) Core Parking and the Timer Coalescing API.
Visit Channel 9 or click continue to view the video (requires
Silverlight).