12 ms·

Does showing seconds in the system tray actually use more power?

216 points by LorenDB 1y ago

Jaxan 1y ago
I hate these kind of “saves power” things in windows settings. The OS itself pings home so often, sends network request for everything you do, shows ads on the login screen, makes screenshots (for Recall), Edge sends contents from web forms for “AI”. And now it is my responsibility to disable showing seconds in the taskbar??? If microsoft really wants to be green, windows shouldn’t do all these wasteful things!
- lxgr 1y ago
  Both things can be true/desirable at the same time. If, as tested, this setting makes a double-digit percentage difference, I'm glad Microsoft exposes it in the UI. I'd also be glad if they didn't do as much weird stuff on their user's devices as they do.
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    > If, as tested, this setting makes a double-digit percentage difference, I'm glad Microsoft exposes it in the UI. I'd rather them write more performant code. This feels like your car having the option to burn motor oil to show a more precise clock on the dash; you don't get kudos for adding an off-switch for that.
    - minitech 1y ago
      > I'd rather them write more performant code. In keeping with the theme of the comment you're replying to, writing better-performing code and providing performance options are not mutually exclusive. Both are good ideas. > This feels like your car having the option to burn motor oil to show a more precise clock on the dash; you don't get kudos for adding an off-switch for that. (Sounds more like you're arguing that it should be forced off instead of being an option? Reasonable take in this case, but not the same argument.)
      - jjj123 1y ago
        No, I think they’re arguing that showing seconds in the system tray shouldn’t be so inefficient that turning it off gives back double-digit percentage energy savings. I think we all agree there needs to be some additional power draw for the seconds feature, but it’s unclear how much power is truly necessary vs this just being a poor implementation.
        ants_everywhere 1y ago
        there's a dramatic increase in how frequently you interrupt the CPU to update the display. That is true at the OS level no matter how efficient you make the second display code.
        troupo 1y ago
        How about web views throughout the OS? The new start menu written in React? There's an ungodly amount of CPU and GPU spikes throughout the OS which make the "omg seconds" invisible in comparison
      - morganherlocker 1y ago
        It shouldn't take any noticable power/cycles to accomplish this task. Having flags for "performance" littered through the codebase and UI is a classic failure mode that leads to a janky slow base performance. "Do always and inhibit when not needed".
    - aksss 1y ago
      Better analogy would be reducing your MPGs (fuel efficiency) to show a more precise clock, and arguably we all make that sacrifice to get CarPlay. Energy isn’t free. Even if they wrote more performant code, it would just mean less relative loss of energy to show seconds but still loss compared to not showing seconds.
      - pavel_lishin 1y ago
        Of course it's not free - TANSTAAFL - but it should certainly not increase energy consumption by 13%!
    - orangecat 1y ago
      This feels like your car having the option to burn motor oil to show a more precise clock on the dash I actively don't want to see seconds; the constant updating is distracting. It should be an option even if there were no energy impact. (Ditto for terminal cursor blinking).
      - p_ing 1y ago
        ...Did you not see that it is an option, off by default?
      - _9ptr 1y ago
        Doesn't the blinking cursor tell you it's ready for input and not still running the previous command? Seems useful.
        eviks 1y ago
        There are better shape/color alternatives for that
        lucb1e 1y ago
        I have cursor blinking off anywhere I can. The prompt is what tells me I can type something, or in a GUI program, you can always type if there is a cursor no matter if it's solid or blinking. At least, that's my experience, perhaps you're familiar with another system or piece of software where the blinking is what tells you that you can enter something?
    - criddell 1y ago
      > I'd rather them write more performant code. My expectations of Microsoft software aren't terribly high. I'd say Windows is performant (ie it works about as well as I expect).
    - daveoc64 1y ago
      It's really an on switch. The feature is off by default in Windows 11 and was not offered in any previous non-beta Windows version.
      - anonymars 1y ago
        But you could open the clock flyout and see it on demand. Now it's all-or-nothing (unless they changed it, again) (Have I mentioned how much I loathe Windows 11?)
  - Xylakant 1y ago
    The test setting is important here - the test is on an otherwise idle machine. This means that the update ensures that some thread wakes on a timer every second which may explain the large drop. This test is interesting, but not very representative of a real world usage scenario. It’ll be interesting to compare it to the results of the other test they running, where they keep a video running in the background.
    - Delk 1y ago
      I'm still a little curious of what's causing the increase in power use. A single additional wakeup per second should not have a two-digit percentage impact on power use when even an idle machine is probably going to have dozens of wakeups per second anyway. I wonder if updating the seconds display somehow causes lots of extra wakeups instead.
  - Delk 1y ago
    Mentioning that some setting uses more power can be useful and desirable. I think Jaxan might be irked by "energy recommendations" Windows gives you in power & battery settings, though. It suggests applying "energy saving recommendations" to lower your carbon footprint, and while I absolutely support energy saving, I also find those "recommendations" obnoxious. The recommendations suggest, among other things, switching to power-saving mode, turning on dark mode, setting screen brightness for energy efficiency, and auto-suspending and turning the screen off after 3 minutes. Power-saving mode saves little at least on most laptops but has a significant performance impact, dark mode only saves power on LED displays (LCDs have a slight inverse effect), and both dark/light mode and screen brightness should be set based on ergonomics, not based on saving three watts. When these kinds of recommendations are given to the consumer for "lowering your carbon footprint", with a green leaf symbol for impact, while Microsoft's data centres keep spending enormous amounts of power on data analysis, I find it hard to see that as anything more than greenwashing.
- ctoth 1y ago
  I had some very technical friends be incredibly surprised by the Edge form thing, I think that is not sufficiently called out! They send any text you type in a form to their AI cloud and hold on to it for 30 days. Any form. On any website. What the actual fuck?
  - smokel 1y ago
    This is only true if you enable extended spell checks, which makes some sense. By default, no form data is sent to Microsoft AFAIK. Note that the same holds for Google Chrome.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - atq2119 1y ago
      In what world does holding the user's private data for 30 days make sense for a spell checker? Even sending the data at all is sad. We've had offline spell checking for decades.
      - perching_aix 1y ago
        For the same reason Grammarly does it too, I'd assume.
      - justsomehnguy 1y ago
        To track when the user corrects it. Otherwise you can't adapt if somehow the correction is not what the user wanted. If there are a bunch of these corrections you know something is wrong there. IMO 30 days is quite modest and if this is properly anonymized.. Edit: dear HN user who decided to silently downvote - you could do better by actually voicing your opinion
        perching_aix 1y ago
        > dear HN user who decided to silently downvote - you could do better by actually voicing your opinion Sure, I'll bite. Let's address the obvious issue first: what you're saying is speculation. I can only provide my own speculation in return, and then you might or might not find it agreeable, or at least claim either way. And there will be nothing I can do about it. I generally don't find this valuable or productive, and I did disagree with yours, hence my silent downvote. But since you're explicitly asking for other people's speculation, here I go. Advanced "spellchecking" necessitates the usage of AI, as natural languages cannot ever be fully processed using just hard coded logic. This is not an opinion, you learn this when taking formal languages class at university. It arises from formal logic only being able to wrangle formal logic abiding things, which natural languages aren't (else they'd be called formal languages). What the opinion is, and the speculation is, is that this is what the feature kicks off when it sends over input data to MS's servers for advanced "spellchecking", much like what I speculate Grammarly does too. Either that, or these services have some proprietary language engine that they'd rather keep on their own premises, because why put your moat out there if you don't strictly have to. Technologically speaking, at this point it might be possible to do this locally, on-device now. This further didn't use to be the case I believe (although I do not have sources on this), and so this would be another reason why you'd send people's inputs to the shadow realm.
- ape4 1y ago
  I would check: - Don't show ads (saves power) - Don't call home (saves power)
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    This might be considered if they ever find out how shitty Windows can get before people actually stop buying computers with it.
    - mouse_ 1y ago
      As long as Red Hat keeps embracing and extending free desktop, and Apple keeps disallowing standard features like native Vulkan (Mac is not for games I get it but come on, please?), people will either keep using Windows or, more likely, switch to Android devices for their home and business needs.
- jasonthorsness 1y ago
  There was a fight in Vista time frame about whether or not animated/video desktop backgrounds were a good idea. They were definitely cool, but AT WHAT COST. Ended up shipping as an "extra".
  - trinix912 1y ago
    And nowadays we got people running Wallpaper Engine on their idling laptops in college classes ;)
- HPsquared 1y ago
  And Windows Update burns through an ungodly amount of CPU.
  - fkrkrkgkgk 1y ago
    And it is only getting worse. I would consider windows update on its own enough reason for not using this shit os at all. Be aware! https://youtu.be/4RQ6pek3JoM https://youtu.be/4RQ6pek3JoM
    - imtringued 1y ago
      I've stopped using Windows for the same reason. Windows Update is a steaming pile of garbage. It has bricked my Windows installation so many times.
  - TiredOfLife 1y ago
    Tell me you last used Windows 7/8 without telling me.
- IgorPartola 1y ago
  Wonder how much an OS that focuses on battery life can extend working time on a laptop. Would be a killer marketing point I think.
- Kwpolska 1y ago
  This setting is disabled by default.
- blibble 1y ago
  > And now it is my responsibility to disable showing seconds in the taskbar??? If microsoft really wants to be green, windows shouldn’t do all these wasteful things! and building multiple gigawatt consuming data centres to produce AI slop no-one asked for and no-one wants powered by fossil fuels
  - netsharc 1y ago
    "This is Windows 11, you'll need a new PC for it, throw away your old PC and wreck the planet some more, and by the way we'll stop supporting Windows 10 in October 2025, if your PC gets a malware and your bank account gets hacked and drained it's not our fault".
- ozgrakkurt 1y ago
  Similar vibe with telling people to not flush two times in toilet while companies are pouring literal poison into oceans/seas. Also airlines asking for extra money to offset emissions, just absolute insanity
  - dist-epoch 1y ago
    While those same airlines fly empty planes just to avoid losing airport slots.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  > Edge sends contents from web forms for “AI” That reminds me of Chrom[e|ium]'s insanely bad form suggest/autofill logic: The browser creates some sort of fuzzy hash/fingerprint of the forms you visit, and uses that with some Google black box to "crowdsource" what kinds of field-data to suggest... even when both the user and the web-designer try to stop it. For example, imagine you're editing a list of Customers, and Chrome keeps trying to trick you into entering your own "first name" and "last name" whenever you add or edit an entry. For a while developers could stop that with autocomplete="off" and then Chromium deliberately put in code to ignore it. I'm not sure how much of a privacy leak those form-fingerprints are, but they are presumptively shady when the developers ignore countless detailed complaints over many years in order to keep the behavior. https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40093420 https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40093420
  - o11c 1y ago
    > For a while developers could stop that with autocomplete="off" and then Chromium deliberately put in code to ignore it. To be fair, websites with a horrible misunderstanding of security kept on using that for "this password is important, better make sure the user is forced to enter it by hand!"
- zozbot234 1y ago
  This is not Windows-specific, it has been shown wrt. Linux systems also. It's why recent Linux desktop environments have gotten rid of the blinking cursor in command prompt windows (that also causes frequent wakeups and screen updates) and why it probably makes sense to disable most animations too.
  - userbinator 1y ago
    It's why recent Linux desktop environments have gotten rid of the blinking cursor in command prompt windows This used to be done entirely in hardware (VGA text modes), and I believe some early GPUs had a feature to do that in graphics modes too.
  - JdeBP 1y ago
    I was surprised that no-one mentioned this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473048 , where someone is trying to put software-implemented text blinking into OpenBSD.
- cheema33 1y ago
  > And now it is my responsibility to disable showing seconds in the taskbar??? It is not. This "feature" is disabled by default. Google "manufactured outrage".
- anonymars 1y ago
  To be fair, does it do all those things every second? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/kernel/no-wake-timers https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/k... (For the record, I abhor Windows 11)
- albert_e 1y ago
  And forcefully overrides personal preferences to NOT ahouls any Windows Spotlight images and trivia on lock screen, and news and recommended content on Edge homescreen
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  > makes screenshots (for Recall) It doesn't because that feature only just release, only works on specific new laptops and most ipmortant: YOU HAVE TO MANUALLY ENABLE IT
lxgr 1y ago
That's quite surprising. I wouldn't have imagined Windows (or any other "desktop OS") to go to great lengths to optimize for static screen content in the way that e.g. smartphones or wearables do, which as I understand have dedicated hardware optimized for displaying a fully static screen while powering down large parts of the display pipeline.
- jayd16 1y ago
  Windows runs on laptops and tablets and such. At this point they probably do a fair bit of that sort of thing.
- pdw 1y ago
  The decision to now show seconds dates back to Windows 95. Back then the motivation was not power saving, but rather to allow the code related to the clock and text rendering to be swapped out to disk on a 386 with 4MB RAM... Raymond Chen: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031010-00/?p=42203 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031010-00/?p=42...
- layer8 1y ago
  Desktop OSs idle most of the time, and the comparison is with respect to an idle desktop. Forcing context switches and propagating updates through the GUI stack every second isn’t free in that situation, it means that at least one CPU core can’t stay in a lower-power state. In contrast, you probably won’t see much of difference in battery life for the seconds display when simultaneously watching video or running computational tasks.
- craftkiller 1y ago
  Laptops also optimize for displaying a fully static screen. It's called "Panel Self Refresh" or "PSR". https://hardwaresecrets.com/introducing-the-panel-self-refresh-technology/ https://hardwaresecrets.com/introducing-the-panel-self-refre... On my laptop, I can check if it is enabled with: cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0000:c1:00.0/eDP-1/psr_state cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0000:c1:00.0/eDP-1/psr_capability
seanalltogether 1y ago
> Test Type: Idle desktop only (no applications or media playback, unless otherwise stated) It's weird they didn't also include a simple web browser test that navigates a set of web links and scrolls the window occasionally. Just something very light at least, doesn't even have to be heavy like video playback.
- jasonthorsness 1y ago
  Yeah this is not meaningful due to the unrealistic workload. Sad thing is, I bet a web browser test would still show the difference, as long as a page is kept static on the screen for more than a few seconds before moving on. Power consumption is incredibly difficult to benchmark in a meaningful way because it is extremely dependent on all the devices in the system, all the software running, and most power optimizations are workload dependent. Tons of time went into this in the windows fundamentals team at Microsoft.
- rustyminnow 1y ago
  Not that weird. Idle desktop isolates the effects of the change to get a worst case scenario. Would be interesting to see a light activity test too though - see if you still get a noticeable difference.
- 0x_rs 1y ago
  I agree. My guess is the way this may be implemented could keep the system from entering a lower energy state in some way or another, something which would be far less noticeable during normal usage.
- viraptor 1y ago
  > We’re currently running the same test again on all three laptops to account for variance, but this time with a video playing to simulate a more active usage scenario. Once those results are in, we’ll update the relevant section with the new data.
  - delusional 1y ago
    What? "We are doing a second test to account for variance, but also changing the test setup" that doesn't make any sense.
gleenn 1y ago
13% less battery time is pretty wild just from updating the screen once per second but interesting to understand why.
- starburst 1y ago
  Incompetence
  - userbinator 1y ago
    You mean "Microsoft"... but that's really the same thing these days.
- Calwestjobs 1y ago
  (linux + KDE) i save 24% by using black (#000000) everything, backgrounds, full theme, contrast control setting in firefox etc. on notebook with OLED screen. also if possible not using Chromes / safaris youtube video player but downloading of a video makes huge energy savings. (and using MPV in linux or properly configured PotPlayer in windows. VLC or default MS video apps are bad at energy saving.) And we are talking about 15+ hours of actual office work in webbrowser + little bit of python math. so add 24% on top of that... that is literally weekend worth of work on one charge. current generation of laptop CPUS is insane.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
Laudauer's principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle) tells us that you can't delete a bit without releasing some heat. As the new time digits come in and overwrite the old ones (in the framebuffer, in the LCD, likely other places too) this would occur as the previous digits were deleted. So the only case where showing the time would not take more power is one where other things are not held equal, e.g. some quirk of the software ends up doing more work to ignore the time than to show it (I'd call such a thing a bug). This effect is likely vanishlingly small, definitely overshadowed by engineering considerations like the voltage used when walking pixels through changes and such. But still, it's a physics nudge towards "yes".
- ramraj07 1y ago
  When the start menu is a react native app that spikes up the cpu needing billions of flops just to do that, I doubt this number will make a difference.
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    Agreed, the dominant effect would likely be which ads are being served to the start menu, or which user data is being exfiltrated to Microsoft at the time.
  - dlcarrier 1y ago
    Is that true? Was Active Desktop just a preview of what's to come?
  - internet2000 1y ago
    Wasn't that debunked already?
- HPsquared 1y ago
  What if it's an OLED screen and the clock is in a dark font on a light background, so adding seconds means less light is emitted? (Light mode only)
rwallace 1y ago
I hope so, because I actively want seconds absent from the system tray. Attention is a scarce resource; the fewer things on the screen constantly changing and thereby consuming my attention, the better. If saving power means we remain free from that anti-feature, great.
- aksss 1y ago
  I, for one, love it for casual and incidental benchmarking. Of everything - not just a process I run, but also how long between bird chirps outside my window. But I also find it very easy to ignore, too. Glad it’s optional.
  - Asraelite 1y ago
    Does nobody care about just being able to tell the time accurately? 59 seconds makes a big difference for joining online meetings and things.
    - bigstrat2003 1y ago
      Approximately zero people in the world care if you join a meeting at 1:00, or 1:01. It's good to aim to be punctual, but if you're off by a minute there is no consequence.
      - argomo 1y ago
        I'm curious how you came to such a universally sweeping conclusion. At any rate, it's incorrect as I have personally observed counterexamples in my professional career.
        yawaramin 1y ago
        Companies where people care that you join a meeting just one minute late? Sounds kind of unbelievable tbh. Humans are humans.
      - crazygringo 1y ago
renewiltord 1y ago
42 minutes of battery life lost on 321 minutes of battery life is insane.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  On an idle desktop that does nothing it makes sense. There's nothing else going on on the screen, so any difference becomes easier to notice. I doubt these results are as extreme when something else is happening on screen. Those results should be added to this article later: > We’re currently running the same test again on all three laptops to account for variance, but this time with a video playing to simulate a more active usage scenario. Once those results are in, we’ll update the relevant section with the new data.
endorphine 1y ago
I was wondering the same when configuring Polybar w/ i3 to show seconds on my Linux system. Even if it's marginal, I think I'll disable it.
jambutters 1y ago
Does this happen on linux? Polybar with i3 has an option to show seconds by clicking the date and time
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  It's going to take power, no matter the operating system. What matter is how much power it takes. On most desktop environments and widgets, it's probably negligible.
- pdw 1y ago
  It certainly does. There is for example a measurable energy cost for having a blinking cursor in a terminal, and there have been huge flame wars about efforts to move to non-blinking cursors. The compromise for GNOME Terminal is that the cursor will stop blinking after a terminal has been idle for ten seconds.
  - everybodyknows 1y ago
    Why not similarly disable seconds display after some specifiable time has elapsed since the last key or mouse event? The decimal digits could be replaced with a greyed-out ":--".
- wirybeige 1y ago
  It happens on GNOME at the very least, and I would expect every modern platform is the same way.
layer8 1y ago
Raymond Chen recently wrote about the history of seconds on the taskbar: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250421-00/?p=111095 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250421-00/?p=11...
- ranger_danger 1y ago
  After reading only the title of the HN story I automatically assumed it was probably Raymond. Always a pleasure reading his posts.
- troupo 1y ago
  I call bull on every part of this story when it talks about "power team looking at windows performance as a whole, environment etc." Because it's enough to look at modern Windows and things like "CPU spikes 100s of percent when opening start menu because it's now written in React"
  - panta 1y ago
    At some point we'll have to admit that worse is actually worse.
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    It's a bit hard to call bullshit when even the summary of the discussion is still measured to the microwatt. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some misalignments in goals though. E.g. if their team's goals are measured in results of typical battery life tests such as "how many hours the computer can sit idle playing a video" then they would be heavily weighted towards caring about these kinds of constantly recurring background draws instead of active usage draws.
    - troupo 1y ago
      > they would be heavily weighted towards caring about these kinds of constantly recurring background draws instead of active usage draws. Yeah, it's very likely "metrics- driven development" when optimizing certain metrics becomes its own isolated goal
1718627440 1y ago
I don't get it. If the system is busy, it will update the screen less then a second anyway, if it is not it will go to sleep after less then a minute. Does Windows not turn off the display when unused, and then goes to sleep after a while?
- viraptor 1y ago
  This is not a test of normal usage. This is a scenario of sleep disabled and an idle system.
russellbeattie 1y ago
> Some Reddit users on the same thread also pointed out that while the system is already doing plenty in the background, even small updates like this might prevent deeper power-saving states. This is undoubtedly the answer, and I suspect that if any actual effort were made by Microsoft, the problem might be eliminated entirely. Maybe. Most likely, the update is implemented calling a standard stack of system calls that are completely benign in a normal application, which is already limiting power savings in various ways. But when run by itself, the call stack is triggering a bunch of stuff that ends up using a bit more power. The big question is: Can this actually be optimized with some dedicated programming time? Or is the display/task bar/scheduling such a convoluted mess in Windows that updating the time every second without causing a bunch of other stuff to wake up is impossible without a complete rewrite.
userbinator 1y ago
There are two conclusions one can draw from this: either the idle power consumption of laptops is so low that something as trivial as updating the clock display on an otherwise idle system[1] is a significant amount, or their code is so shitty that it's taking an order of magnitude or more power than it should. Given this is Microsoft, I'm inclined to believe the latter, or that it was "deliberately" implemented in an inefficient way to "prove" their argument. It'd be trivial to write a tiny Win32 app that just has an incrementing seconds counter and use that to distinguish the latter two cases. [1] The caveat is that the majority of the time the system will not be idle but doing something else possibly even more energy-intensive.
nothrowaways 1y ago
Tldr, yes.
DecentShoes 1y ago
I would have been happy with no seconds in the tray, but showing the seconds if you click on the clock - technology that existed a decade ago in Windows 10, but is obviously technologically impossible for hundreds of PhD holding software engineers at the richest company in the world to figure out in 2025.
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y ago
  >”PhD holding software engineers at the richest company in the world to figure out in 2025.” Let’s be honest, implementing this would be up to a bunch of offshore contractors because corporate can’t bring itself to pay software engineers to implement this feature thoughtfully and comprehensively.
- rayiner 1y ago
  All the smart engineers must have left to do AI stuff. The new windows 11 "power savings" settings menu has this gamification angle. It tells you that you've enabled "5 of 7 power saving settings" or whatever, in a way that implies the goal is to get all 7. It triggers my OCD every time I see the screen and it implies that quest is unfinished.
  - esperent 1y ago
    Performative environmentalism, standard operating procedure for every big company. Shift the blame onto the consumer, make them feel guilty because they set their screen timeout to to more than 5 minutes. Gamification is a great tool for making people feel pressured and guilty but with plausible deniability for the company. Meanwhile, build database centers at incredible scale to run AI and force it into those same consumers in every way possible, but never tell them how much power that wastes.
    - signalToNose 1y ago
      Coin mining and AI database centers consumer huge amounts of power. I’m not really exited about either. Both enterprises seems like scams to centralize wealth and power to a few actors.
DoctorOetker 1y ago
Oh come on, the seconds are entirely predictable, run from 00 to 59, so basically storing 10 frames ("0" to "9") in the font and foreground/background colors, the location on the screen into a small reserved buffer in whatever piece of code is responsible for the final screen frame handover, and this could be updated with minimal overhead and without a context switch,... Yes, it would require a small API addition to the desktop server (wayland, X11, ...) to "register"/transfer/update those 10 frames, their locations ... whenever the user initializes or changes the fonts, font size, ... the context switch can be totally eliminated.
- fkrkrkgkgk 1y ago
  It’s a feature to exercise the whole display stack at every update, to make sure it works, for example when running remote desktop (or any other similar protocol/stack like citrix), where you can observe if the network still can send packets every second. Otherwise you need to wait a minute before noticing connectivity issues. Both rdp and citrix are extremely fragile and a clock that updates every second is a very good visual indicator for monitoring the connection. https://xkcd.com/1172 https://xkcd.com/1172
fkrkrkgkgk 1y ago
Who cares about this, when a geforce 5090 is using so much power that it most often is turning power cables into a furnace.
- opan 1y ago
  People without a 5090, I guess. People using devices that run off battery rather than desktop computers.
- mrheosuper 1y ago
  people without 5090
albert_e 1y ago
Wonder if it make sense to architect computers with a small sidecar CPU that is not as powerful but it also runs at ultra low power ... so tasks like these can be delegated to it while allowing the main CPU to enter low power state when nothing else is placing demand on it.
- cwillu 1y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE
  - pbhjpbhj 1y ago
    This link is to Arm's big.LITTLE, but other companies have efficiency cores (E-cores) too and may run fewer cores at lower clock to save power.
- phire 1y ago
  The extra CPU usage isn't that bad. Updating a single number isn't that hard. The bigger problem is waking up the GPU and all the communication between components, which is why the computer with integrated graphics takes a smaller hit than the one with dedicated graphics. And why the ARM laptop did even better, because they were optimised for this usecase.
  - userbinator 1y ago
    I'm not sure if the GPU is even needed for an operation like this. Basically modifying a few dozen bytes in the framebuffer every second. It would be interesting to disable all graphical acceleration, causing the CPU to do all the work, and see what difference that makes to the test.
    - o11c 1y ago
      Windowing systems these days tend to spam the GPU in the name of performance, unfortunately.
    - 1y ago
draebek 1y ago
Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft Windows engineer, also did a video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe1ltXdKMow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe1ltXdKMow
alok-g 1y ago
Out of curiosity, what would it take to not have the system lose so much energy with this setting? My watch too updates seconds every second. Someone in the comments on this thread has mentioned hardware-based blinking cursors. A computer that could do over billion calculations per second should not need much to render a 30x30 (say) pixel area.
- rajnathani 1y ago
  3 reasons that I can think of: (1) For mostly static screens that the GPU's frame buffer (and pipeline) could be empty and there would be nothing to process. (2) The font rendering algorithm will have to run every second. These are not simple bitmap-type monospace fonts, and thus the calculation of the output will have to be done every second and that these rendered digits-combinations likely aren't cached. (3) The thread for system clock displaying system can set a sleep for 1 minute (after it has aligned to the start of the minute (or in actuality the cron-type service underlying operating systems is likely used here for which the alignment to the minute start is already a given)), instead of 1 second.
  - alok-g 1y ago
    Thanks. For #2, it needs to render around 66 characters per minute. The power loss mentioned collectively is 15% in battery life. When I open a Word doc, that would show say around 1500 characters on the screen within two-three sevonds without any noteworthy drop in battery level. Hence, I do not think it is font rendering.
maxglute 1y ago
What if taskbar autohides?

216 points by LorenDB 1y ago

I hate these kind of “saves power” things in windows settings. The OS itself pings home so often, sends network request for everything you do, shows ads on the login screen, makes screenshots (for Recall), Edge sends contents from web forms for “AI”. And now it is my responsibility to disable showing seconds in the taskbar??? If microsoft really wants to be green, windows shouldn’t do all these wasteful things!

lxgr 1y ago
Both things can be true/desirable at the same time. If, as tested, this setting makes a double-digit percentage difference, I'm glad Microsoft exposes it in the UI. I'd also be glad if they didn't do as much weird stuff on their user's devices as they do.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  > If, as tested, this setting makes a double-digit percentage difference, I'm glad Microsoft exposes it in the UI. I'd rather them write more performant code. This feels like your car having the option to burn motor oil to show a more precise clock on the dash; you don't get kudos for adding an off-switch for that.
  - minitech 1y ago
    > I'd rather them write more performant code. In keeping with the theme of the comment you're replying to, writing better-performing code and providing performance options are not mutually exclusive. Both are good ideas. > This feels like your car having the option to burn motor oil to show a more precise clock on the dash; you don't get kudos for adding an off-switch for that. (Sounds more like you're arguing that it should be forced off instead of being an option? Reasonable take in this case, but not the same argument.)
    - jjj123 1y ago
      No, I think they’re arguing that showing seconds in the system tray shouldn’t be so inefficient that turning it off gives back double-digit percentage energy savings. I think we all agree there needs to be some additional power draw for the seconds feature, but it’s unclear how much power is truly necessary vs this just being a poor implementation.
      - ants_everywhere 1y ago
        there's a dramatic increase in how frequently you interrupt the CPU to update the display. That is true at the OS level no matter how efficient you make the second display code.
        troupo 1y ago
        How about web views throughout the OS? The new start menu written in React? There's an ungodly amount of CPU and GPU spikes throughout the OS which make the "omg seconds" invisible in comparison
    - morganherlocker 1y ago
      It shouldn't take any noticable power/cycles to accomplish this task. Having flags for "performance" littered through the codebase and UI is a classic failure mode that leads to a janky slow base performance. "Do always and inhibit when not needed".
  - aksss 1y ago
    Better analogy would be reducing your MPGs (fuel efficiency) to show a more precise clock, and arguably we all make that sacrifice to get CarPlay. Energy isn’t free. Even if they wrote more performant code, it would just mean less relative loss of energy to show seconds but still loss compared to not showing seconds.
    - pavel_lishin 1y ago
      Of course it's not free - TANSTAAFL - but it should certainly not increase energy consumption by 13%!
  - orangecat 1y ago
    This feels like your car having the option to burn motor oil to show a more precise clock on the dash I actively don't want to see seconds; the constant updating is distracting. It should be an option even if there were no energy impact. (Ditto for terminal cursor blinking).
    - p_ing 1y ago
      ...Did you not see that it is an option, off by default?
    - _9ptr 1y ago
      Doesn't the blinking cursor tell you it's ready for input and not still running the previous command? Seems useful.
      - eviks 1y ago
        There are better shape/color alternatives for that
      - lucb1e 1y ago
        I have cursor blinking off anywhere I can. The prompt is what tells me I can type something, or in a GUI program, you can always type if there is a cursor no matter if it's solid or blinking. At least, that's my experience, perhaps you're familiar with another system or piece of software where the blinking is what tells you that you can enter something?
  - criddell 1y ago
    > I'd rather them write more performant code. My expectations of Microsoft software aren't terribly high. I'd say Windows is performant (ie it works about as well as I expect).
  - daveoc64 1y ago
    It's really an on switch. The feature is off by default in Windows 11 and was not offered in any previous non-beta Windows version.
    - anonymars 1y ago
      But you could open the clock flyout and see it on demand. Now it's all-or-nothing (unless they changed it, again) (Have I mentioned how much I loathe Windows 11?)
- Xylakant 1y ago
  The test setting is important here - the test is on an otherwise idle machine. This means that the update ensures that some thread wakes on a timer every second which may explain the large drop. This test is interesting, but not very representative of a real world usage scenario. It’ll be interesting to compare it to the results of the other test they running, where they keep a video running in the background.
  - Delk 1y ago
    I'm still a little curious of what's causing the increase in power use. A single additional wakeup per second should not have a two-digit percentage impact on power use when even an idle machine is probably going to have dozens of wakeups per second anyway. I wonder if updating the seconds display somehow causes lots of extra wakeups instead.
- Delk 1y ago
  Mentioning that some setting uses more power can be useful and desirable. I think Jaxan might be irked by "energy recommendations" Windows gives you in power & battery settings, though. It suggests applying "energy saving recommendations" to lower your carbon footprint, and while I absolutely support energy saving, I also find those "recommendations" obnoxious. The recommendations suggest, among other things, switching to power-saving mode, turning on dark mode, setting screen brightness for energy efficiency, and auto-suspending and turning the screen off after 3 minutes. Power-saving mode saves little at least on most laptops but has a significant performance impact, dark mode only saves power on LED displays (LCDs have a slight inverse effect), and both dark/light mode and screen brightness should be set based on ergonomics, not based on saving three watts. When these kinds of recommendations are given to the consumer for "lowering your carbon footprint", with a green leaf symbol for impact, while Microsoft's data centres keep spending enormous amounts of power on data analysis, I find it hard to see that as anything more than greenwashing.
ctoth 1y ago
I had some very technical friends be incredibly surprised by the Edge form thing, I think that is not sufficiently called out! They send any text you type in a form to their AI cloud and hold on to it for 30 days. Any form. On any website. What the actual fuck?
- smokel 1y ago
  This is only true if you enable extended spell checks, which makes some sense. By default, no form data is sent to Microsoft AFAIK. Note that the same holds for Google Chrome.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - atq2119 1y ago
    In what world does holding the user's private data for 30 days make sense for a spell checker? Even sending the data at all is sad. We've had offline spell checking for decades.
    - perching_aix 1y ago
      For the same reason Grammarly does it too, I'd assume.
    - justsomehnguy 1y ago
      To track when the user corrects it. Otherwise you can't adapt if somehow the correction is not what the user wanted. If there are a bunch of these corrections you know something is wrong there. IMO 30 days is quite modest and if this is properly anonymized.. Edit: dear HN user who decided to silently downvote - you could do better by actually voicing your opinion
      - perching_aix 1y ago
        > dear HN user who decided to silently downvote - you could do better by actually voicing your opinion Sure, I'll bite. Let's address the obvious issue first: what you're saying is speculation. I can only provide my own speculation in return, and then you might or might not find it agreeable, or at least claim either way. And there will be nothing I can do about it. I generally don't find this valuable or productive, and I did disagree with yours, hence my silent downvote. But since you're explicitly asking for other people's speculation, here I go. Advanced "spellchecking" necessitates the usage of AI, as natural languages cannot ever be fully processed using just hard coded logic. This is not an opinion, you learn this when taking formal languages class at university. It arises from formal logic only being able to wrangle formal logic abiding things, which natural languages aren't (else they'd be called formal languages). What the opinion is, and the speculation is, is that this is what the feature kicks off when it sends over input data to MS's servers for advanced "spellchecking", much like what I speculate Grammarly does too. Either that, or these services have some proprietary language engine that they'd rather keep on their own premises, because why put your moat out there if you don't strictly have to. Technologically speaking, at this point it might be possible to do this locally, on-device now. This further didn't use to be the case I believe (although I do not have sources on this), and so this would be another reason why you'd send people's inputs to the shadow realm.
ape4 1y ago
I would check: - Don't show ads (saves power) - Don't call home (saves power)
- bee_rider 1y ago
  This might be considered if they ever find out how shitty Windows can get before people actually stop buying computers with it.
  - mouse_ 1y ago
    As long as Red Hat keeps embracing and extending free desktop, and Apple keeps disallowing standard features like native Vulkan (Mac is not for games I get it but come on, please?), people will either keep using Windows or, more likely, switch to Android devices for their home and business needs.
jasonthorsness 1y ago
There was a fight in Vista time frame about whether or not animated/video desktop backgrounds were a good idea. They were definitely cool, but AT WHAT COST. Ended up shipping as an "extra".
- trinix912 1y ago
  And nowadays we got people running Wallpaper Engine on their idling laptops in college classes ;)
HPsquared 1y ago
And Windows Update burns through an ungodly amount of CPU.
- fkrkrkgkgk 1y ago
  And it is only getting worse. I would consider windows update on its own enough reason for not using this shit os at all. Be aware! https://youtu.be/4RQ6pek3JoM https://youtu.be/4RQ6pek3JoM
  - imtringued 1y ago
    I've stopped using Windows for the same reason. Windows Update is a steaming pile of garbage. It has bricked my Windows installation so many times.
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  Tell me you last used Windows 7/8 without telling me.
IgorPartola 1y ago
Wonder how much an OS that focuses on battery life can extend working time on a laptop. Would be a killer marketing point I think.
Kwpolska 1y ago
This setting is disabled by default.
blibble 1y ago
> And now it is my responsibility to disable showing seconds in the taskbar??? If microsoft really wants to be green, windows shouldn’t do all these wasteful things! and building multiple gigawatt consuming data centres to produce AI slop no-one asked for and no-one wants powered by fossil fuels
- netsharc 1y ago
  "This is Windows 11, you'll need a new PC for it, throw away your old PC and wreck the planet some more, and by the way we'll stop supporting Windows 10 in October 2025, if your PC gets a malware and your bank account gets hacked and drained it's not our fault".
ozgrakkurt 1y ago
Similar vibe with telling people to not flush two times in toilet while companies are pouring literal poison into oceans/seas. Also airlines asking for extra money to offset emissions, just absolute insanity
- dist-epoch 1y ago
  While those same airlines fly empty planes just to avoid losing airport slots.
Terr_ 1y ago
> Edge sends contents from web forms for “AI” That reminds me of Chrom[e|ium]'s insanely bad form suggest/autofill logic: The browser creates some sort of fuzzy hash/fingerprint of the forms you visit, and uses that with some Google black box to "crowdsource" what kinds of field-data to suggest... even when both the user and the web-designer try to stop it. For example, imagine you're editing a list of Customers, and Chrome keeps trying to trick you into entering your own "first name" and "last name" whenever you add or edit an entry. For a while developers could stop that with autocomplete="off" and then Chromium deliberately put in code to ignore it. I'm not sure how much of a privacy leak those form-fingerprints are, but they are presumptively shady when the developers ignore countless detailed complaints over many years in order to keep the behavior. https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40093420 https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40093420
- o11c 1y ago
  > For a while developers could stop that with autocomplete="off" and then Chromium deliberately put in code to ignore it. To be fair, websites with a horrible misunderstanding of security kept on using that for "this password is important, better make sure the user is forced to enter it by hand!"
zozbot234 1y ago
This is not Windows-specific, it has been shown wrt. Linux systems also. It's why recent Linux desktop environments have gotten rid of the blinking cursor in command prompt windows (that also causes frequent wakeups and screen updates) and why it probably makes sense to disable most animations too.
- userbinator 1y ago
  It's why recent Linux desktop environments have gotten rid of the blinking cursor in command prompt windows This used to be done entirely in hardware (VGA text modes), and I believe some early GPUs had a feature to do that in graphics modes too.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  I was surprised that no-one mentioned this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473048 , where someone is trying to put software-implemented text blinking into OpenBSD.
cheema33 1y ago
> And now it is my responsibility to disable showing seconds in the taskbar??? It is not. This "feature" is disabled by default. Google "manufactured outrage".
anonymars 1y ago
To be fair, does it do all those things every second? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/kernel/no-wake-timers https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/k... (For the record, I abhor Windows 11)
albert_e 1y ago
And forcefully overrides personal preferences to NOT ahouls any Windows Spotlight images and trivia on lock screen, and news and recommended content on Edge homescreen
TiredOfLife 1y ago
> makes screenshots (for Recall) It doesn't because that feature only just release, only works on specific new laptops and most ipmortant: YOU HAVE TO MANUALLY ENABLE IT

lxgr 1y ago

That's quite surprising. I wouldn't have imagined Windows (or any other "desktop OS") to go to great lengths to optimize for static screen content in the way that e.g. smartphones or wearables do, which as I understand have dedicated hardware optimized for displaying a fully static screen while powering down large parts of the display pipeline.

jayd16 1y ago
Windows runs on laptops and tablets and such. At this point they probably do a fair bit of that sort of thing.
pdw 1y ago
The decision to now show seconds dates back to Windows 95. Back then the motivation was not power saving, but rather to allow the code related to the clock and text rendering to be swapped out to disk on a 386 with 4MB RAM... Raymond Chen: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031010-00/?p=42203 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031010-00/?p=42...
layer8 1y ago
Desktop OSs idle most of the time, and the comparison is with respect to an idle desktop. Forcing context switches and propagating updates through the GUI stack every second isn’t free in that situation, it means that at least one CPU core can’t stay in a lower-power state. In contrast, you probably won’t see much of difference in battery life for the seconds display when simultaneously watching video or running computational tasks.
craftkiller 1y ago
Laptops also optimize for displaying a fully static screen. It's called "Panel Self Refresh" or "PSR". https://hardwaresecrets.com/introducing-the-panel-self-refresh-technology/ https://hardwaresecrets.com/introducing-the-panel-self-refre... On my laptop, I can check if it is enabled with: cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0000:c1:00.0/eDP-1/psr_state cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0000:c1:00.0/eDP-1/psr_capability

seanalltogether 1y ago

> Test Type: Idle desktop only (no applications or media playback, unless otherwise stated) It's weird they didn't also include a simple web browser test that navigates a set of web links and scrolls the window occasionally. Just something very light at least, doesn't even have to be heavy like video playback.

jasonthorsness 1y ago
Yeah this is not meaningful due to the unrealistic workload. Sad thing is, I bet a web browser test would still show the difference, as long as a page is kept static on the screen for more than a few seconds before moving on. Power consumption is incredibly difficult to benchmark in a meaningful way because it is extremely dependent on all the devices in the system, all the software running, and most power optimizations are workload dependent. Tons of time went into this in the windows fundamentals team at Microsoft.
rustyminnow 1y ago
Not that weird. Idle desktop isolates the effects of the change to get a worst case scenario. Would be interesting to see a light activity test too though - see if you still get a noticeable difference.
0x_rs 1y ago
I agree. My guess is the way this may be implemented could keep the system from entering a lower energy state in some way or another, something which would be far less noticeable during normal usage.
viraptor 1y ago
> We’re currently running the same test again on all three laptops to account for variance, but this time with a video playing to simulate a more active usage scenario. Once those results are in, we’ll update the relevant section with the new data.
- delusional 1y ago
  What? "We are doing a second test to account for variance, but also changing the test setup" that doesn't make any sense.

gleenn 1y ago

13% less battery time is pretty wild just from updating the screen once per second but interesting to understand why.

starburst 1y ago
Incompetence
- userbinator 1y ago
  You mean "Microsoft"... but that's really the same thing these days.
Calwestjobs 1y ago
(linux + KDE) i save 24% by using black (#000000) everything, backgrounds, full theme, contrast control setting in firefox etc. on notebook with OLED screen. also if possible not using Chromes / safaris youtube video player but downloading of a video makes huge energy savings. (and using MPV in linux or properly configured PotPlayer in windows. VLC or default MS video apps are bad at energy saving.) And we are talking about 15+ hours of actual office work in webbrowser + little bit of python math. so add 24% on top of that... that is literally weekend worth of work on one charge. current generation of laptop CPUS is insane.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

Laudauer's principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle) tells us that you can't delete a bit without releasing some heat. As the new time digits come in and overwrite the old ones (in the framebuffer, in the LCD, likely other places too) this would occur as the previous digits were deleted. So the only case where showing the time would not take more power is one where other things are not held equal, e.g. some quirk of the software ends up doing more work to ignore the time than to show it (I'd call such a thing a bug). This effect is likely vanishlingly small, definitely overshadowed by engineering considerations like the voltage used when walking pixels through changes and such. But still, it's a physics nudge towards "yes".

ramraj07 1y ago
When the start menu is a react native app that spikes up the cpu needing billions of flops just to do that, I doubt this number will make a difference.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  Agreed, the dominant effect would likely be which ads are being served to the start menu, or which user data is being exfiltrated to Microsoft at the time.
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  Is that true? Was Active Desktop just a preview of what's to come?
- internet2000 1y ago
  Wasn't that debunked already?
HPsquared 1y ago
What if it's an OLED screen and the clock is in a dark font on a light background, so adding seconds means less light is emitted? (Light mode only)

rwallace 1y ago

I hope so, because I actively want seconds absent from the system tray. Attention is a scarce resource; the fewer things on the screen constantly changing and thereby consuming my attention, the better. If saving power means we remain free from that anti-feature, great.

aksss 1y ago
I, for one, love it for casual and incidental benchmarking. Of everything - not just a process I run, but also how long between bird chirps outside my window. But I also find it very easy to ignore, too. Glad it’s optional.
- Asraelite 1y ago
  Does nobody care about just being able to tell the time accurately? 59 seconds makes a big difference for joining online meetings and things.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    Approximately zero people in the world care if you join a meeting at 1:00, or 1:01. It's good to aim to be punctual, but if you're off by a minute there is no consequence.
    - argomo 1y ago
      I'm curious how you came to such a universally sweeping conclusion. At any rate, it's incorrect as I have personally observed counterexamples in my professional career.
      - yawaramin 1y ago
        Companies where people care that you join a meeting just one minute late? Sounds kind of unbelievable tbh. Humans are humans.
    - crazygringo 1y ago

renewiltord 1y ago

42 minutes of battery life lost on 321 minutes of battery life is insane.

jeroenhd 1y ago
On an idle desktop that does nothing it makes sense. There's nothing else going on on the screen, so any difference becomes easier to notice. I doubt these results are as extreme when something else is happening on screen. Those results should be added to this article later: > We’re currently running the same test again on all three laptops to account for variance, but this time with a video playing to simulate a more active usage scenario. Once those results are in, we’ll update the relevant section with the new data.

endorphine 1y ago

I was wondering the same when configuring Polybar w/ i3 to show seconds on my Linux system. Even if it's marginal, I think I'll disable it.

jambutters 1y ago

Does this happen on linux? Polybar with i3 has an option to show seconds by clicking the date and time

dlcarrier 1y ago
It's going to take power, no matter the operating system. What matter is how much power it takes. On most desktop environments and widgets, it's probably negligible.
pdw 1y ago
It certainly does. There is for example a measurable energy cost for having a blinking cursor in a terminal, and there have been huge flame wars about efforts to move to non-blinking cursors. The compromise for GNOME Terminal is that the cursor will stop blinking after a terminal has been idle for ten seconds.
- everybodyknows 1y ago
  Why not similarly disable seconds display after some specifiable time has elapsed since the last key or mouse event? The decimal digits could be replaced with a greyed-out ":--".
wirybeige 1y ago
It happens on GNOME at the very least, and I would expect every modern platform is the same way.

layer8 1y ago

Raymond Chen recently wrote about the history of seconds on the taskbar: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250421-00/?p=111095 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250421-00/?p=11...

ranger_danger 1y ago
After reading only the title of the HN story I automatically assumed it was probably Raymond. Always a pleasure reading his posts.
troupo 1y ago
I call bull on every part of this story when it talks about "power team looking at windows performance as a whole, environment etc." Because it's enough to look at modern Windows and things like "CPU spikes 100s of percent when opening start menu because it's now written in React"
- panta 1y ago
  At some point we'll have to admit that worse is actually worse.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  It's a bit hard to call bullshit when even the summary of the discussion is still measured to the microwatt. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some misalignments in goals though. E.g. if their team's goals are measured in results of typical battery life tests such as "how many hours the computer can sit idle playing a video" then they would be heavily weighted towards caring about these kinds of constantly recurring background draws instead of active usage draws.
  - troupo 1y ago
    > they would be heavily weighted towards caring about these kinds of constantly recurring background draws instead of active usage draws. Yeah, it's very likely "metrics- driven development" when optimizing certain metrics becomes its own isolated goal

1718627440 1y ago

I don't get it. If the system is busy, it will update the screen less then a second anyway, if it is not it will go to sleep after less then a minute. Does Windows not turn off the display when unused, and then goes to sleep after a while?

viraptor 1y ago
This is not a test of normal usage. This is a scenario of sleep disabled and an idle system.

russellbeattie 1y ago

> Some Reddit users on the same thread also pointed out that while the system is already doing plenty in the background, even small updates like this might prevent deeper power-saving states. This is undoubtedly the answer, and I suspect that if any actual effort were made by Microsoft, the problem might be eliminated entirely. Maybe. Most likely, the update is implemented calling a standard stack of system calls that are completely benign in a normal application, which is already limiting power savings in various ways. But when run by itself, the call stack is triggering a bunch of stuff that ends up using a bit more power. The big question is: Can this actually be optimized with some dedicated programming time? Or is the display/task bar/scheduling such a convoluted mess in Windows that updating the time every second without causing a bunch of other stuff to wake up is impossible without a complete rewrite.

userbinator 1y ago

There are two conclusions one can draw from this: either the idle power consumption of laptops is so low that something as trivial as updating the clock display on an otherwise idle system[1] is a significant amount, or their code is so shitty that it's taking an order of magnitude or more power than it should. Given this is Microsoft, I'm inclined to believe the latter, or that it was "deliberately" implemented in an inefficient way to "prove" their argument. It'd be trivial to write a tiny Win32 app that just has an incrementing seconds counter and use that to distinguish the latter two cases. [1] The caveat is that the majority of the time the system will not be idle but doing something else possibly even more energy-intensive.

nothrowaways 1y ago

Tldr, yes.

DecentShoes 1y ago

I would have been happy with no seconds in the tray, but showing the seconds if you click on the clock - technology that existed a decade ago in Windows 10, but is obviously technologically impossible for hundreds of PhD holding software engineers at the richest company in the world to figure out in 2025.

BuyMyBitcoins 1y ago
>”PhD holding software engineers at the richest company in the world to figure out in 2025.” Let’s be honest, implementing this would be up to a bunch of offshore contractors because corporate can’t bring itself to pay software engineers to implement this feature thoughtfully and comprehensively.
rayiner 1y ago
All the smart engineers must have left to do AI stuff. The new windows 11 "power savings" settings menu has this gamification angle. It tells you that you've enabled "5 of 7 power saving settings" or whatever, in a way that implies the goal is to get all 7. It triggers my OCD every time I see the screen and it implies that quest is unfinished.
- esperent 1y ago
  Performative environmentalism, standard operating procedure for every big company. Shift the blame onto the consumer, make them feel guilty because they set their screen timeout to to more than 5 minutes. Gamification is a great tool for making people feel pressured and guilty but with plausible deniability for the company. Meanwhile, build database centers at incredible scale to run AI and force it into those same consumers in every way possible, but never tell them how much power that wastes.
  - signalToNose 1y ago
    Coin mining and AI database centers consumer huge amounts of power. I’m not really exited about either. Both enterprises seems like scams to centralize wealth and power to a few actors.

DoctorOetker 1y ago

Oh come on, the seconds are entirely predictable, run from 00 to 59, so basically storing 10 frames ("0" to "9") in the font and foreground/background colors, the location on the screen into a small reserved buffer in whatever piece of code is responsible for the final screen frame handover, and this could be updated with minimal overhead and without a context switch,... Yes, it would require a small API addition to the desktop server (wayland, X11, ...) to "register"/transfer/update those 10 frames, their locations ... whenever the user initializes or changes the fonts, font size, ... the context switch can be totally eliminated.

fkrkrkgkgk 1y ago
It’s a feature to exercise the whole display stack at every update, to make sure it works, for example when running remote desktop (or any other similar protocol/stack like citrix), where you can observe if the network still can send packets every second. Otherwise you need to wait a minute before noticing connectivity issues. Both rdp and citrix are extremely fragile and a clock that updates every second is a very good visual indicator for monitoring the connection. https://xkcd.com/1172 https://xkcd.com/1172

fkrkrkgkgk 1y ago

Who cares about this, when a geforce 5090 is using so much power that it most often is turning power cables into a furnace.

opan 1y ago
People without a 5090, I guess. People using devices that run off battery rather than desktop computers.
mrheosuper 1y ago
people without 5090

albert_e 1y ago

Wonder if it make sense to architect computers with a small sidecar CPU that is not as powerful but it also runs at ultra low power ... so tasks like these can be delegated to it while allowing the main CPU to enter low power state when nothing else is placing demand on it.

cwillu 1y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_big.LITTLE
- pbhjpbhj 1y ago
  This link is to Arm's big.LITTLE, but other companies have efficiency cores (E-cores) too and may run fewer cores at lower clock to save power.
phire 1y ago
The extra CPU usage isn't that bad. Updating a single number isn't that hard. The bigger problem is waking up the GPU and all the communication between components, which is why the computer with integrated graphics takes a smaller hit than the one with dedicated graphics. And why the ARM laptop did even better, because they were optimised for this usecase.
- userbinator 1y ago
  I'm not sure if the GPU is even needed for an operation like this. Basically modifying a few dozen bytes in the framebuffer every second. It would be interesting to disable all graphical acceleration, causing the CPU to do all the work, and see what difference that makes to the test.
  - o11c 1y ago
    Windowing systems these days tend to spam the GPU in the name of performance, unfortunately.
  - 1y ago

draebek 1y ago

Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft Windows engineer, also did a video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe1ltXdKMow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe1ltXdKMow

alok-g 1y ago

Out of curiosity, what would it take to not have the system lose so much energy with this setting? My watch too updates seconds every second. Someone in the comments on this thread has mentioned hardware-based blinking cursors. A computer that could do over billion calculations per second should not need much to render a 30x30 (say) pixel area.

rajnathani 1y ago
3 reasons that I can think of: (1) For mostly static screens that the GPU's frame buffer (and pipeline) could be empty and there would be nothing to process. (2) The font rendering algorithm will have to run every second. These are not simple bitmap-type monospace fonts, and thus the calculation of the output will have to be done every second and that these rendered digits-combinations likely aren't cached. (3) The thread for system clock displaying system can set a sleep for 1 minute (after it has aligned to the start of the minute (or in actuality the cron-type service underlying operating systems is likely used here for which the alignment to the minute start is already a given)), instead of 1 second.
- alok-g 1y ago
  Thanks. For #2, it needs to render around 66 characters per minute. The power loss mentioned collectively is 15% in battery life. When I open a Word doc, that would show say around 1500 characters on the screen within two-three sevonds without any noteworthy drop in battery level. Hence, I do not think it is font rendering.

maxglute 1y ago

What if taskbar autohides?