virtualbox.org

Hello,

I am close to trying a surface pro 3 to replace my laptop, but I am concerned about battery drain running a windows 7 vm on windows 8.

Does anyone happen to have this configuration? Curious as to how its working for you.

Thank you!

The only real drain comes when the guest is doing something. When it's just sitting there not running a program or anything else, the processor isn't running much, so very little drain occurs. Take a look at processor usage by program in Task Manager or Process Explorer. The more any program is using the processor, the more battery it's using. I have a Windows 7 64-bit guest running now, the processor usage when idle is around 0.55% - half a percent, not 50%. Same thing for hard drive usage - don't know if a Surface has a platter HD or SSD.

You can experiment by getting a processor-burning test program from an overclocking-enthusiast website, and see how battery usage suffers from one processor or two running constantly. Same idea for platter hard drive usage - I'd think SSD usage wouldn't have as much effect. That should give you worst-case numbers. The guest Windows 7 should not run anywhere near that hard on your battery.

Easiest experiment is to just download Windows 7 from Microsoft (http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... a30356fc3d). They have test iso's you can use for a few months to see what would happen. Virtualbox is easy to get, too and will install the guest from the downloaded iso. Try it and tell us how it goes. (Do research before downloading a 64-bit iso, your Surface bios may not allow VT-X even though the processor may be 64-bit.)

Well the idea is to know this before purchasing. I know the microsoft stores do go above and beyond, so let me see if can bring my VM in to the store and copy it over, fire it up, and run the burn in as you said which is a good idea.

If i can get all that pulled off I will update the results with a full charge drain.

scottgus1 wrote:The only real drain comes when the guest is doing something. When it's just sitting there not running a program or anything else, the processor isn't running much, so very little drain occurs. Take a look at processor usage by program in Task Manager or Process Explorer. The more any program is using the processor, the more battery it's using. I have a Windows 7 64-bit guest running now, the processor usage when idle is around 0.55% - half a percent, not 50%. Same thing for hard drive usage - don't know if a Surface has a platter HD or SSD.

You can experiment by getting a processor-burning test program from an overclocking-enthusiast website, and see how battery usage suffers from one processor or two running constantly. Same idea for platter hard drive usage - I'd think SSD usage wouldn't have as much effect. That should give you worst-case numbers. The guest Windows 7 should not run anywhere near that hard on your battery.

Easiest experiment is to just download Windows 7 from Microsoft . They have test iso's you can use for a few months to see what would happen. Virtualbox is easy to get, too and will install the guest from the downloaded iso. Try it and tell us how it goes. (Do research before downloading a 64-bit iso, your Surface bios may not allow VT-X even though the processor may be 64-bit.)

You don't have one yet. Gotcha. Missed that part.

It'll be interesting to hear how it works!

Hello, I'm also curious about the Surface 3 behavior. Given the fact that it has an SSD, I wonder what impact on the SSD's lifetime the virtual disk changes will have:
On a platter HDD, modifying an existing file causes a rewrite of the whole file onto an new location (I'm not referring to just expanding the file's size) unless the program that manipulates the file writes its changes in place whenever possible (like MS Outlook or SQL Server – or Oracle). On an SSD this is bound to use up free cells faster than "ordinary" usage. OTOH, writing changes in place will exhaust the allowed R/W cycles, also faster than "ordinary" usage…