Given that laptops run on battery, sometimes choosing what software to run and what activities you want to do on it can make a difference. If you’re planning to use your laptop mainly for work, chances are you will want to keep the video and music playing to a minimum as those tend to drain battery.
Even more so if you were thinking about playing games. However browsing the web should be fine, right? Well it turns out that the answer is yes and no depending on which browser you are using. According to reports, it seems that Google’s Chrome browser is a bit of a battery drain on Windows laptops.
In fact this was an issue that was brought up as far back as 2008, and was highlighted again back in September 2012, meaning that if you were wondering why your laptop’s battery is draining so fast, there is a chance that Chrome could be the culprit. Oddly enough Google has not done anything, at least until a recent article by Forbes brought it to mainstream attention again.
According to Forbes, they discovered that the reason behind the battery drain is due to Chrome cranking up the timer resolution on Windows to ensure a speedy response. Windows is currently set to 15.6ms as default, but upon inspection it was discovered that Chrome is set at 1ms, meaning that the processor on your laptop is being woken up a thousand times a second, which undoubtedly is a huge battery drain!
This is apparently a common coding misstep with Windows applications and the good news is that the priority of the issue has since been raised after the article on Forbes. It has also been listed as a blocker, meaning that it has been flagged as unusable on older devices at least until it has been fixed.
We can’t be sure when Google will actually get around to issuing a fix for it, but at least they’ve taken note of it. In the meantime have any Windows laptop users noticed the battery drain when they are using Chrome?