A bug was found in notebooks that can cut their battery life by upwards of 28% because they are unable to go into lower power modes to conserve battery power due to USB 2.0 devices polling the machine.

First of all, it’s important to characterize the impact of the USB 2.0 asynchronous scheduler bug on both Core Duo and Pentium M based systems. Using the Lenovo T60 and T43 as comparison points, we found that without the fix, adding a bus-powered USB device such as a memory stick reduced battery life anywhere from 18 – 28%. In the case of the T43, a 28% reduction in battery life for simply plugging in a USB 2.0 device is beyond ridiculous. In the case of both notebooks, applying Microsoft’s fix gives you almost all of your battery life back.

A very interesting and serious problem, with a fix that does not always work.

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