Consumption of Power for MS Windows

[Steven Hair]

Does anyone know anything about the power usage of knoppix (please give specific version unless general info) or the power usage of MS Dos 5, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, or XP Pro? I need the info for a science fair project.

[firebyrd10]

Does anyone know anything about the power usage of knoppix (please give specific version unless general info) or the power usage of MS Dos 5, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, or XP Pro? I need the info for a science fair project.

Power as in Watts?

Becuase Power usage if noramlly defined with the amount of hardware. So if ran on the same machine, the only thing that would cause a power difference is the amount of CPU usage really. Dos by default uses the least. (I say default because all the others use GUI's)

Though I doubt the difference would be a significant amount.

[garyng]

This is a difficult to answer question. Power consumption depends on mostly hardware. One might think DOS being so bare use less power ? Try to do an experiement on a notebook and boot a linux that is not bootable(because of whatever error and halt at init). The fan would turn on very soon even you are not running anything. This is related to power saving feature of modern day hardware. Without the proper OS, they would be there doing nothing but still consume quite some energy.

So I won't be surprise to see two identical machine one running DOS, another XP and that the XP one use less power, as DOS may not have the facility to turn off the HD, or the screen and for some mobile GPU.

On a desktop which don't have any power saving device, the difference may be minimal with DOS may be using less but should be almost the same on idle.

So I would say this question itself is a bit off.

[Steven Hair]

Thanks a lot. This helps me a little bit. I thought that dos would use the least, too...