When marketing Windows Vista to laptop users, Microsoft often boasts that the OS's new power-saving features will help boost battery life when compared to Windows XP. According to users and even some of Microsoft's hardware partners, however, that claim is simply not true. The culprit appears to be Vista's Aero Glass interface, which apparently sucks up a lot of juice while dazzling the user with visual effects. And remember, in Vista, Aero Glass is turned on by default. "They've really made it complex from a power management standpoint," said John Wozniak, a distinguished technologist in HP's notebook engineering department. "The potential is there to do some good things, the bad thing is that it comes with the canned settings...and we didn't like any of them." The experts are advising that users manually adjust Vista's power settings in order to increase battery life--something to keep in mind when crafting that custom Vista image for your enterprise's laptop deployments.

For more on Vista's thirst for power:
- see this ZDnet article