New
#21
I'm not qualified to join the "better designed" debate, but I thought I'd point out one battery-related area where W7 has a massive "architectural" advantage over previous versions of Windows, and one which will only get bigger with time as more driver developers get on board.
One of the best ways to increase battery life is to maximise the percentage of time during which the laptop processor is idling or even entering a lower-power state (because it's got nothing to do). Processor interrupts are a big obstacle: every few milliseconds, a hardware interrupt wakes up the OS thread dispatcher (so it can decide which thread to run next), or a drive controller might interrupt to let the OS know that a file copy chunk is available, or another device might interrupt for reasons entirely its own, and so on.
W7 introduces a "timing sensitivity" rating to its interrupts so that driver developers can (optionally) specify just how important it is to their code that their interrupts be handled exactly at a given point in time. In other words, as a hardware device driver, do you really care whether your periodic once-every-second interrupt is handled precisely at 1.000 seconds, or is plus/minus 50ms sufficiently timely for your needs. In many scenarios the handling can be off by hundreds of ms without any downside.
The clever bit is that the OS can then "batch" the interrupt handling by doing a few of them a mite too early or too late, and thus maximising the intervals without activity when the processor(s) can idle or even enter lower power states. The more driver developers take advantage of this facility, the greater the possible battery life improvements.