8 ms·

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

by 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

by Jaxan 1y ago

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