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This newsletter contains archived content. No warranty is made as to technical accuracy of content or currency of URLs.
Designing for Better Mobile PC Battery Life
Most consumers want and need longer battery life in laptops. Consequently, improving battery life is a high priority for most PC professionals.
Battery life depends on a complex combination of factors, including:
• Hardware selection, involving not only the battery but also the processor and peripheral devices.
• Device and driver optimization to take advantage of low-power states.
• Operating system configuration through power policy settings.
• Preinstalled software optimization to ensure that the hardware can enter low-power states.
A new guide on the WHDC Web site summarizes knowledge that was gained over months of work with PC manufacturers. Mobile Battery Life Solutions: A Guide for Mobile Platform Professionals identifies issues and defines solutions for measuring and then optimizing battery life and on-and-off performance on Windows laptops.
Whatever your responsibility--system or component design, driver or application development, testing, or IT professional--you will find information to help you to maximize battery life in the mobile PCs you design, deliver, or maintain.
From the Editor
After months of slaving over a hot word processor, we are pleased to announce the release of the Mobile Battery Life Solutions cookbook. We are investing time and effort into improving customers' experience with Windows Vista, and one key area is improving the battery life performance on mobile PCs.
With that in mind, we have spent the last few months documenting known best practices to help partners optimize their platforms and deliver extended battery life. The guide contains detailed checklists to ensure that partners have all the ingredients they need to improve device, driver, and application performance.
Battery life is also in the press as consumers try to deal with limited battery life and as OEMs are reviewed based on how long their batteries last. More research and development is happening, and new battery types are being released that don't explode--always a nice feature for something that sits on your lap.
A link to provide feedback is included in the guide, and we welcome any comments.
— The WHDC Web team
Virtualization in Windows Server 2008
New Things Happening with the WDK
The Windows Driver Kit (WDK) documentation team has a couple of exciting new changes this month. The first is a new blog where you can get timely information about the WDK and the Windows Logo Kit (WLK) documentation kits and connect with the WDK documentation team. The second is a new release of the WDK, on February 6, that includes Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 content, as well as new features. These new features are described briefly here; see the new blog for details.
• Documentation topic filtering in Document Explorer: You can now use the Document Explorer viewer to filter the WDK documentation to view only the topics, to index entries, or to search results for specific categories.
• Quick access to requirements information on reference topics: Reference topics for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista in Document Explorer have a new "!" button at the top of the topic to help you to quickly display information in the Requirements section.
• Wiki for the WDK on MSDN pages: The MSDN WDK documentation set features wiki functionality so that driver developers outside Microsoft can add their tips, tricks, and best practices to WDK topics.
• Beta version of side-by-side machine translation: The MSDN WDK documentation set features a beta version of side-by-side machine translation for the Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish languages.
What's New on the Blogs for Hardware and Driver Developers
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The WDK documentation team at Microsoft has a new blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/wdkdocs/. The purposes of this blog are to provide timely information about the WDK and Windows Logo Kit (WLK) documentation sets and to connect Windows driver developers with the WDK documentation team. More...
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...Windows Server 2008's Hyper-V has been in public beta for a while now and lots of people have been experimenting with it. One aspect that I am focusing on is storage for those virtualized environments and more specifically the options related to SAN storage... More...
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...With the launch right around the corner (Feb 27) we receive a lot of questions from developers about how to get ready for Windows Server 2008 (WS2K8). Here are my top 10 resources... More...
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...Burton Smith is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who thinks about ways in which our platform needs to be structured to support general purpose computers that will soon have clustered super computer processing power as we move closer to manycore everywhere (not too far off into the future)... More...
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Windows Logo Program Tools and News
WLK 1.1 Service Pack Release Announcement
We are pleased to announce the release of the Windows Logo Kit 1.1 Service Pack (build 1.1.6475.100). This release delivers the new Extensible Authentication Protocol logo program. It does not include any Driver Test Manager (DTM) feature changes or additional new tests. Although this release may be used to qualify devices and drivers for all current logo programs, it is not a required upgrade.
• New Logo Programs in the SP Release
Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)
• New Preview Tests in the SP Release for future logo requirements
None
• New Required Tests in the SP release for existing logo requirements
None
• New Features
None
• Support Information
This release is fully supported by Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS) and Winqual for logo submissions on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows Server 2008.
Preview tests in this release are supported via the Microsoft Connect Web site. Logo Program Submissions for Windows Server 2008 System Now Open
Vendors may make Windows Server 2008 System submissions to WHQL starting January 21, 2008. The minimum operating system build for Windows Server 2008 that will be accepted for logo testing and submission is build number 6001.17128.080101-1935, the RTM Escrow build, released on January 9 and available on the Microsoft Connect beta download Web site. Later builds are also acceptable. Testing with accepted builds may begin immediately. Version 1.1 of the Windows Logo Kit is required for this testing; please see http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKpkg.mspx. Within 30 days of the date that the final RTM build of Windows Server 2008 is released, all subsequent Windows Server 2008 System logo testing should be done.
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