[HN Gopher] Does showing seconds in the system tray actually use...
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Does showing seconds in the system tray actually use more power?
Author : LorenDB
Score : 112 points
Date : 2025-07-13 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lttlabs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lttlabs.com)
| Jaxan wrote:
| I hate these kind of "saves power" things in windows settings.
| The OS itself pings home so often, sends network request for
| everything you do, shows ads on the login screen, makes
| screenshots (for Recall), Edge sends contents from web forms for
| "AI". And now it is my responsibility to disable showing seconds
| in the taskbar??? If microsoft really wants to be green, windows
| shouldn't do all these wasteful things!
| lxgr wrote:
| Both things can be true/desirable at the same time.
|
| If, as tested, this setting makes a double-digit percentage
| difference, I'm glad Microsoft exposes it in the UI. I'd also
| be glad if they didn't do as much weird stuff on their user's
| devices as they do.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _If, as tested, this setting makes a double-digit
| percentage difference, I 'm glad Microsoft exposes it in the
| UI._
|
| I'd rather them write more performant code. This feels like
| your car having the option to burn motor oil to show a more
| precise clock on the dash; you don't get kudos for adding an
| off-switch for that.
| minitech wrote:
| > I'd rather them write more performant code.
|
| In keeping with the theme of the comment you're replying
| to, writing better-performing code and providing
| performance options are not mutually exclusive. Both are
| good ideas.
|
| > This feels like your car having the option to burn motor
| oil to show a more precise clock on the dash; you don't get
| kudos for adding an off-switch for that.
|
| (Sounds more like you're arguing that it should be forced
| off instead of being an option? Reasonable take in this
| case, but not the same argument.)
| jjj123 wrote:
| No, I think they're arguing that showing seconds in the
| system tray shouldn't be so inefficient that turning it
| off gives back double-digit percentage energy savings.
|
| I think we all agree there needs to be some additional
| power draw for the seconds feature, but it's unclear how
| much power is truly necessary vs this just being a poor
| implementation.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| there's a dramatic increase in how frequently you
| interrupt the CPU to update the display. That is true at
| the OS level no matter how efficient you make the second
| display code.
| morganherlocker wrote:
| It shouldn't take any noticable power/cycles to
| accomplish this task. Having flags for "performance"
| littered through the codebase and UI is a classic failure
| mode that leads to a janky slow base performance. "Do
| always and inhibit when not needed".
| aksss wrote:
| Better analogy would be reducing your MPGs (fuel
| efficiency) to show a more precise clock, and arguably we
| all make that sacrifice to get CarPlay.
|
| Energy isn't free.
|
| Even if they wrote more performant code, it would just mean
| less relative loss of energy to show seconds but still loss
| compared to not showing seconds.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Of course it's not free - TANSTAAFL - but it should
| certainly not increase energy consumption by 13%!
| orangecat wrote:
| _This feels like your car having the option to burn motor
| oil to show a more precise clock on the dash_
|
| I actively don't want to see seconds; the constant updating
| is distracting. It should be an option even if there were
| no energy impact. (Ditto for terminal cursor blinking).
| p_ing wrote:
| ...Did you not see that it is an option, off by default?
| GLdRH wrote:
| Doesn't the blinking cursor tell you it's ready for input
| and not still running the previous command? Seems useful.
| criddell wrote:
| > I'd rather them write more performant code.
|
| My expectations of Microsoft software aren't terribly high.
| I'd say Windows is performant (ie it works about as well as
| I expect).
| daveoc64 wrote:
| It's really an on switch.
|
| The feature is off by default in Windows 11 and was not
| offered in any previous non-beta Windows version.
| anonymars wrote:
| But you could open the clock flyout and see it on demand.
| Now it's all-or-nothing (unless they changed it, again)
|
| (Have I mentioned how much I loathe Windows 11?)
| Xylakant wrote:
| The test setting is important here - the test is on an
| otherwise idle machine. This means that the update ensures
| that some thread wakes on a timer every second which may
| explain the large drop. This test is interesting, but not
| very representative of a real world usage scenario. It'll be
| interesting to compare it to the results of the other test
| they running, where they keep a video running in the
| background.
| Delk wrote:
| I'm still a little curious of what's causing the increase
| in power use. A single additional wakeup per second should
| not have a two-digit percentage impact on power use when
| even an idle machine is probably going to have dozens of
| wakeups per second anyway. I wonder if updating the seconds
| display somehow causes _lots_ of extra wakeups instead.
| Delk wrote:
| Mentioning that some setting uses more power can be useful
| and desirable. I think Jaxan might be irked by "energy
| recommendations" Windows gives you in power & battery
| settings, though. It suggests applying "energy saving
| recommendations" to lower your carbon footprint, and while I
| absolutely support energy saving, I also find those
| "recommendations" obnoxious.
|
| The recommendations suggest, among other things, switching to
| power-saving mode, turning on dark mode, setting screen
| brightness for energy efficiency, and auto-suspending and
| turning the screen off after 3 minutes.
|
| Power-saving mode saves little at least on most laptops but
| has a significant performance impact, dark mode only saves
| power on LED displays (LCDs have a slight inverse effect),
| and both dark/light mode and screen brightness should be set
| based on ergonomics, not based on saving three watts.
|
| When these kinds of recommendations are given to the consumer
| for "lowering your carbon footprint", with a green leaf
| symbol for impact, while Microsoft's data centres keep
| spending enormous amounts of power on data analysis, I find
| it hard to see that as anything more than greenwashing.
| ctoth wrote:
| I had some very technical friends be incredibly surprised by
| the Edge form thing, I think that is not sufficiently called
| out!
|
| They send any text you type in a form to their AI cloud and
| hold on to it for 30 days.
|
| Any form.
|
| On any website.
|
| What the actual fuck?
| smokel wrote:
| This is only true if you enable extended spell checks, which
| makes _some_ sense. By default, no form data is sent to
| Microsoft AFAIK. Note that the same holds for Google Chrome.
| atq2119 wrote:
| In what world does holding the user's private data for 30
| days make sense for a _spell checker_? Even sending the
| data at all is sad. We 've had offline spell checking for
| decades.
| perching_aix wrote:
| For the same reason Grammarly does it too, I'd assume.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| To track when the user corrects it. Otherwise you can't
| adapt if somehow the correction is not what the user
| wanted.
|
| If there are _a bunch_ of these corrections you know
| something is wrong there. IMO 30 days is quite modest and
| if this is properly anonymized..
|
| Edit: dear HN user who decided to silently downvote - you
| could do better by actually voicing your opinion
| perching_aix wrote:
| > dear HN user who decided to silently downvote - you
| could do better by actually voicing your opinion
|
| Sure, I'll bite. Let's address the obvious issue first:
| what you're saying is speculation. I can only provide my
| own speculation in return, and then you might or might
| not find it agreeable, or at least claim either way. And
| there will be nothing I can do about it. I generally
| don't find this valuable or productive, and I did
| disagree with yours, hence my silent downvote.
|
| But since you're explicitly asking for other people's
| speculation, here I go. Advanced "spellchecking"
| necessitates the usage of AI, as natural languages cannot
| ever be fully processed using just hard coded logic. This
| is not an opinion, you learn this when taking formal
| languages class at university. It arises from formal
| logic only being able to wrangle formal logic abiding
| things, which natural languages aren't (else they'd be
| called formal languages).
|
| What the opinion is, and the speculation is, is that this
| is what the feature kicks off when it sends over input
| data to MS's servers for advanced "spellchecking", much
| like what I speculate Grammarly does too. Either that, or
| these services have some proprietary language engine that
| they'd rather keep on their own premises, because why put
| your moat out there if you don't strictly have to.
|
| Technologically speaking, at this point it might be
| possible to do this locally, on-device now. This further
| didn't use to be the case I believe (although I do not
| have sources on this), and so this would be another
| reason why you'd send people's inputs to the shadow
| realm.
| demarq wrote:
| It's hard to read writing packed with defensive clauses.
|
| Better to say what you need to say. Leave the defense for
| the occasion someone misunderstood what you meant to say.
| perching_aix wrote:
| It's further pretty hard to write like this, but I still
| prefer it over getting trivially checkmated by ill
| meaning people, and over being misinterpreted silently
| and that causing issues downstream. It's at this point an
| instinctual defense mechanism, that I've grown to
| organically develop in the low-trust environments that
| are forums like this.
| throw10920 wrote:
| I 100% agree with the principle, but (regrettably) in
| practice you can't do this in a lot of places where the
| community is critical (which isn't a bad thing by itself)
| but doesn't call out/downvote/moderate bad criticism
| (which _is_ bad).
|
| I can't count the number of times on HN that I've seen
| responses to posts that took advantage of the poster not
| writing defensively to emotionally attack them in ways
| that absolutely break the HN guidelines, and weren't
| flagged or downvoted. And on other sites, like Reddit,
| it's just the norm.
|
| The defensive writing will continue until morals improve.
| Xorlev wrote:
| This is _often_ (though not always) blanket statement.
|
| Logs are always generated, and logs include some amount
| of data about the user, if only environmental.
|
| It's quite plausible that the spellchecker does _not_
| store your actual user data, but information about the
| request, or error logging includes more UGC than
| intended.
|
| Note: I don't have any insider knowledge about their
| spellcheck API, but I've worked on similar systems which
| have similar language for little more than basic request
| logging.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Reminds me to a video I saw on YouTube from the "PC
| Security Channel", who was utterly flabbergasted that the
| Start Menu would send all keypresses inputted into its
| search bar to MS.
|
| They had searching on the web enabled... Pretty hard to
| search the web using Bing without sending along a search
| term.
| lucumo wrote:
| Stuff like that and the one you replied to are why I
| stopped caring. The outrage is so often complete and
| utter nonsense that my default response is disbelief.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| It came enabled by default. It is not as if this setting
| was searched for, then enabled, then had some unintended
| consequence - taskbar searches used to _not_ search the
| internet, then they _did_.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Which would be a perfectly fine thing to take issue with.
| It just also wouldn't be quite as eye-catching as
| misleadingly portraying the thing as now being a
| keylogger.
| foolswisdom wrote:
| What setting is this? I can only find "Enable machine
| learning powered autofill suggestions" which seems to have
| defaulted to on.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Here you go, from the horse's mouth:
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/learning-
| center/improve...
|
| Note that this is from 2023. Their legal docs, last
| updated in 2024, claim a bit different:
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/microsoft-
| edge/priva...
|
| > By default, Microsoft Edge provides spelling and
| grammar checking using Microsoft Editor. When using
| Microsoft Editor, Microsoft Edge sends your typed text
| and a service token to a Microsoft cloud service over a
| secure HTTPS connection. The service token doesn't
| contain any user-identifiable information. A Microsoft
| cloud service then processes the text to detect spelling
| and grammar errors in your text. _All your typed text
| that 's sent to Microsoft is deleted immediately after
| processing occurs. No data is stored for any period of
| time._
| Teever wrote:
| Something I heard a while back but have never had confirmed
| is that the Nvidia driver sends the content of every window
| title to Nvidia.
|
| Does anyone know if that is true?
| morkalork wrote:
| There was a smart tv that did that with the titles of any
| media played too wasn't there?
| svnt wrote:
| This was when you had to create an account for GeForce
| Experience and they started sending crash stats.
|
| Some people checked it with wireshark at the time and
| didn't find anything other than what was stated. [0]
|
| 0: https://gamersnexus.net/industry/2672-geforce-
| experience-dat...
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Whoa how is this not all over the news at all times?
| NewJazz wrote:
| People are tired of hearing about it. They don't feel like
| they can do anything about it.
| saparaloot wrote:
| The caring cohort has mortages and kids
| jbaber wrote:
| And Linux for desktop is finally easy enough for those of
| us with both.
|
| Microsoft ordered me to buy a new computer for Win 11, so
| I took said kids to Microcenter, asked for a machine
| whose specs could play a particular steam game on Linux,
| returned to my mortgage, installed Ubuntu and haven't
| given Windows a second thought in months.
| Lu2025 wrote:
| Any form meaning passwords too?
| perching_aix wrote:
| Looked into it, the answer seems like it can be both a yes
| or a no, depending on the website and user actions.
|
| By default, when you implement a form that takes a
| password, you (the developer) are going to be using the
| "input" HTML element with the type "password". This element
| is exempt from spellchecking, so no issues there.
|
| However, many websites also implement a temporary password
| reveal feature. To achieve this, one would typically change
| the type of the "input" element to "text" when clicking the
| reveal button, thereby unintentionally allowing
| spellchecking.
|
| You (the developer) can explicitly mark an element to be
| ineligible for spellchecking by setting the "spellchecking"
| attribute to "false", remediating this quirk:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
|
| You (the developer) can of course also just use a different
| approach for implementing a password reveal feature.
|
| As the MDN docs remark, this infoleak vector is known as
| "spelljacking".
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| > Use Windows
|
| > Expect Privacy
|
| > Don't get Privacy
|
| SuprisedPikatchu.jpg
| tspivey wrote:
| I was surprised by this. I don't use Edge much, and I don't
| remember being asked about it.
| ape4 wrote:
| I would check: - Don't show ads (saves power)
| - Don't call home (saves power)
| bee_rider wrote:
| This might be considered if they ever find out how shitty
| Windows can get before people actually stop buying computers
| with it.
| mouse_ wrote:
| As long as Red Hat keeps embracing and extending free
| desktop, and Apple keeps disallowing standard features like
| native Vulkan (Mac is not for games I get it but come on,
| please?), people will either keep using Windows or, more
| likely, switch to Android devices for their home and
| business needs.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| There was a fight in Vista time frame about whether or not
| animated/video desktop backgrounds were a good idea. They were
| definitely cool, but AT WHAT COST. Ended up shipping as an
| "extra".
| trinix912 wrote:
| And nowadays we got people running Wallpaper Engine on their
| idling laptops in college classes ;)
| HPsquared wrote:
| And Windows Update burns through an ungodly amount of CPU.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Wonder how much an OS that focuses on battery life can extend
| working time on a laptop. Would be a killer marketing point I
| think.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| This setting is disabled by default.
| blibble wrote:
| > And now it is my responsibility to disable showing seconds in
| the taskbar??? If microsoft really wants to be green, windows
| shouldn't do all these wasteful things!
|
| and building multiple gigawatt consuming data centres to
| produce AI slop no-one asked for and no-one wants
|
| powered by fossil fuels
| netsharc wrote:
| "This is Windows 11, you'll need a new PC for it, throw away
| your old PC and wreck the planet some more, and by the way
| we'll stop supporting Windows 10 in October 2025, if your PC
| gets a malware and your bank account gets hacked and drained
| it's not our fault".
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| Similar vibe with telling people to not flush two times in
| toilet while companies are pouring literal poison into
| oceans/seas.
|
| Also airlines asking for extra money to offset emissions, just
| absolute insanity
| dist-epoch wrote:
| While those same airlines fly empty planes just to avoid
| losing airport slots.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Edge sends contents from web forms for "AI"
|
| That reminds me of Chrom[e|ium]'s insanely bad form
| suggest/autofill logic: The browser creates some sort of fuzzy
| hash/fingerprint of the forms you visit, and uses that with
| some Google black box to "crowdsource" what kinds of field-data
| to suggest... _even when both the user and the web-designer try
| to stop it_.
|
| For example, imagine you're editing a list of Customers, and
| Chrome keeps trying to trick you into entering _your own_
| "first name" and "last name" whenever you add or edit an entry.
| For a while developers could stop that with autocomplete="off"
| and then Chromium deliberately put in code to ignore it.
|
| I'm not sure how much of a privacy leak those form-fingerprints
| are, but they are presumptively shady when the developers
| ignore countless detailed complaints over many years in order
| to keep the behavior.
|
| https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40093420
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This is not Windows-specific, it has been shown wrt. Linux
| systems also. It's why recent Linux desktop environments have
| gotten rid of the blinking cursor in command prompt windows
| (that also causes frequent wakeups and screen updates) and why
| it probably makes sense to disable most animations too.
| userbinator wrote:
| _It 's why recent Linux desktop environments have gotten rid
| of the blinking cursor in command prompt windows_
|
| This used to be done entirely in hardware (VGA text modes),
| and I believe some early GPUs had a feature to do that in
| graphics modes too.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > And now it is my responsibility to disable showing seconds in
| the taskbar???
|
| It is not. This "feature" is disabled by default.
|
| Google "manufactured outrage".
| anonymars wrote:
| To be fair, does it do all those things every second?
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/k...
|
| (For the record, I abhor Windows 11)
| lxgr wrote:
| That's quite surprising. I wouldn't have imagined Windows (or any
| other "desktop OS") to go to great lengths to optimize for static
| screen content in the way that e.g. smartphones or wearables do,
| which as I understand have dedicated hardware optimized for
| displaying a fully static screen while powering down large parts
| of the display pipeline.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Windows runs on laptops and tablets and such. At this point
| they probably do a fair bit of that sort of thing.
| pdw wrote:
| The decision to now show seconds dates back to Windows 95. Back
| then the motivation was not power saving, but rather to allow
| the code related to the clock and text rendering to be swapped
| out to disk on a 386 with 4MB RAM... Raymond Chen:
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031010-00/?p=42...
| layer8 wrote:
| Desktop OSs idle most of the time, and the comparison is with
| respect to an idle desktop. Forcing context switches and
| propagating updates through the GUI stack every second isn't
| free in that situation, it means that at least one CPU core
| can't stay in a lower-power state. In contrast, you probably
| won't see much of difference in battery life for the seconds
| display when simultaneously watching video or running
| computational tasks.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| > Test Type: Idle desktop only (no applications or media
| playback, unless otherwise stated)
|
| It's weird they didn't also include a simple web browser test
| that navigates a set of web links and scrolls the window
| occasionally. Just something very light at least, doesn't even
| have to be heavy like video playback.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| Yeah this is not meaningful due to the unrealistic workload.
| Sad thing is, I bet a web browser test would still show the
| difference, as long as a page is kept static on the screen for
| more than a few seconds before moving on.
|
| Power consumption is incredibly difficult to benchmark in a
| meaningful way because it is extremely dependent on all the
| devices in the system, all the software running, and most power
| optimizations are workload dependent. Tons of time went into
| this in the windows fundamentals team at Microsoft.
| rustyminnow wrote:
| Not that weird. Idle desktop isolates the effects of the change
| to get a worst case scenario. Would be interesting to see a
| light activity test too though - see if you still get a
| noticeable difference.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| I agree. My guess is the way this may be implemented could keep
| the system from entering a lower energy state in some way or
| another, something which would be far less noticeable during
| normal usage.
| viraptor wrote:
| > We're currently running the same test again on all three
| laptops to account for variance, but this time with a video
| playing to simulate a more active usage scenario. Once those
| results are in, we'll update the relevant section with the new
| data.
| delusional wrote:
| What? "We are doing a second test to account for variance,
| but also changing the test setup" that doesn't make any
| sense.
| viraptor wrote:
| They account for variance between different laptops. The
| test is changing the same way for all laptops. It makes
| sense.
| gleenn wrote:
| 13% less battery time is pretty wild just from updating the
| screen once per second but interesting to understand why.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Laudauer's principle
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle) tells us
| that you can't delete a bit without releasing some heat. As the
| new time digits come in and overwrite the old ones (in the
| framebuffer, in the LCD, likely other places too) this would
| occur as the previous digits were deleted. So the only case where
| showing the time would _not_ take more power is one where other
| things are not held equal, e.g. some quirk of the software ends
| up doing more work to ignore the time than to show it (I 'd call
| such a thing a bug).
|
| This effect is likely vanishlingly small, definitely overshadowed
| by engineering considerations like the voltage used when walking
| pixels through changes and such. But still, it's a physics nudge
| towards "yes".
| ramraj07 wrote:
| When the start menu is a react native app that spikes up the
| cpu needing billions of flops just to do that, I doubt this
| number will make a difference.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Agreed, the dominant effect would likely be which ads are
| being served to the start menu, or which user data is being
| exfiltrated to Microsoft at the time.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Is that true? Was Active Desktop just a preview of what's to
| come?
| internet2000 wrote:
| Wasn't that debunked already?
| HPsquared wrote:
| What if it's an OLED screen and the clock is in a dark font on
| a light background, so adding seconds means less light is
| emitted? (Light mode only)
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Yeah good point. With large enough pixels and pathological
| color choices you could almost certainly derive the opposite
| result.
|
| It would be interesting to test it over a remote desktop
| session where the screen on the device under test is off.
| That would eliminate a lot of factors related to the display.
| Presumably you'd see that the network traffic is either
| larger to begin with, or doesn't compress quite as well,
| giving you another reason to say "yes, but what if..."
| bee_rider wrote:
| Landauer's principle is an information-theoretic result about
| the fundamental cost of computations. With CMOS, every logic
| gate has multiple transistors, some of which just get charged
| and dumped to ground with every state transition anyway.
|
| It is like worry about Carnot's limit... for a motor boat.
| rwallace wrote:
| I hope so, because I actively want seconds absent from the system
| tray. Attention is a scarce resource; the fewer things on the
| screen constantly changing and thereby consuming my attention,
| the better. If saving power means we remain free from that anti-
| feature, great.
| aksss wrote:
| I, for one, love it for casual and incidental benchmarking. Of
| everything - not just a process I run, but also how long
| between bird chirps outside my window. But I also find it very
| easy to ignore, too. Glad it's optional.
| Asraelite wrote:
| Does nobody care about just being able to tell the time
| accurately? 59 seconds makes a big difference for joining
| online meetings and things.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Approximately zero people in the world care if you join a
| meeting at 1:00, or 1:01. It's good to aim to be punctual,
| but if you're off by a minute there is no consequence.
| argomo wrote:
| I'm curious how you came to such a universally sweeping
| conclusion. At any rate, it's incorrect as I have
| personally observed counterexamples in my professional
| career.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That is _definitely_ not true. It 's very dependent on
| the culture, the company, the specific group.
|
| I've met managers who literally lock the conference room
| door when it hits :00.
|
| That's a little crazy in my view, but there are
| definitely places where it's the norm.
|
| There are basically two ways of managing expectations
| around meeting times. The first is that it's acceptable
| for meetings to run late, so it's normal and tolerated
| for people to be late to their _next_ meeting, and
| meetings often start something like 5 minutes late, and
| you try to make sure nothing _really_ important gets
| discussed until 10 minutes in. The other is that it 's
| unacceptable for meetings to start late, so people always
| leave the previous meeting early to make sure they have
| time for bathroom, emergency emails, etc. In which case
| important participants wind up leaving before a decision
| gets made, which is a whole problem of its own.
| rwallace wrote:
| Beware of concentrated benefit and diffuse cost. Sure, let
| a seconds clock be available to call up the 0.1% of the
| time when you want it. But it shouldn't be in the system
| tray presenting a small but ongoing attention drain the
| other 99.9% of the time.
| perching_aix wrote:
| The attention drain is sadly pretty much unmeasurable
| properly, as it's a subjective thing.
|
| I'm one of those freaks who have this on and I honestly
| like it a lot. It gives me a feeling of certainty,
| grounding, and precision.
|
| Primary driver for turning it on was their redesign of
| the clock flyout to be, uhh, nonexistent with Windows 11,
| which I'd previously use on demand for seconds
| information. I was also worried about this being a
| nonsolution and a distraction initially, but it ended up
| being fine.
| GLdRH wrote:
| No and No, it doesn't.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| I just say "one one thousand two one thousand..." under my
| breath.
| userbinator wrote:
| Ideally the clock display should be customisable to display
| whatever level of precision you want; I believe at least one
| Linux application lets you specify it via a strftime() format
| string.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 42 minutes of battery life lost on 321 minutes of battery life is
| insane.
| endorphine wrote:
| I was wondering the same when configuring Polybar w/ i3 to show
| seconds on my Linux system. Even if it's marginal, I think I'll
| disable it.
| jambutters wrote:
| Does this happen on linux? Polybar with i3 has an option to show
| seconds by clicking the date and time
| dlcarrier wrote:
| It's going to take power, no matter the operating system. What
| matter is how much power it takes. On most desktop environments
| and widgets, it's probably negligible.
| pdw wrote:
| It certainly does. There is for example a measurable energy
| cost for having a blinking cursor in a terminal, and there have
| been huge flame wars about efforts to move to non-blinking
| cursors.
|
| The compromise for GNOME Terminal is that the cursor will stop
| blinking after a terminal has been idle for ten seconds.
| wirybeige wrote:
| It happens on GNOME at the very least, and I would expect every
| modern platform is the same way.
| layer8 wrote:
| Raymond Chen recently wrote about the history of seconds on the
| taskbar:
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250421-00/?p=11...
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I don't get it. If the system is busy, it will update the screen
| less then a second anyway, if it is not it will go to sleep after
| less then a minute. Does Windows not turn off the display when
| unused, and then goes to sleep after a while?
| viraptor wrote:
| This is not a test of normal usage. This is a scenario of sleep
| disabled and an idle system.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| > _Some Reddit users on the same thread also pointed out that
| while the system is already doing plenty in the background, even
| small updates like this might prevent deeper power-saving
| states._
|
| This is undoubtedly the answer, and I suspect that if any actual
| effort were made by Microsoft, the problem might be eliminated
| entirely. Maybe.
|
| Most likely, the update is implemented calling a standard stack
| of system calls that are completely benign in a normal
| application, which is already limiting power savings in various
| ways. But when run by itself, the call stack is triggering a
| bunch of stuff that ends up using a bit more power.
|
| The big question is: Can this actually be optimized with some
| dedicated programming time? Or is the display/task bar/scheduling
| such a convoluted mess in Windows that updating the time every
| second without causing a bunch of other stuff to wake up is
| impossible without a complete rewrite.
| userbinator wrote:
| There are two conclusions one can draw from this: either the idle
| power consumption of laptops is so low that something as trivial
| as updating the clock display on an otherwise idle system[1] is a
| significant amount, or their code is so shitty that it's taking
| an order of magnitude or more power than it should. Given this is
| Microsoft, I'm inclined to believe the latter, or that it was
| "deliberately" implemented in an inefficient way to "prove" their
| argument. It'd be trivial to write a tiny Win32 app that just has
| an incrementing seconds counter and use that to distinguish the
| latter two cases.
|
| [1] The caveat is that the majority of the time the system will
| not be idle but doing something else possibly even more energy-
| intensive.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Tldr, yes.
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