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!
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
I would have been happy with no seconds in the tray, but showing the seconds if you click on the clock - technology that existed a decade ago in Windows 10, but is obviously technologically impossible for hundreds of PhD holding software engineers at the richest company in the world to figure out in 2025.
I think the removal was originally about memory usage in Win 95 due to fitting the new OS into lower RAM systems. Then it was about battery usage. More recently the epidemic of feature and information removal from interfaces is primarily driven by the obsession of UX designers to dumb down everything to the lowest common denominator.
By controlling how usage analytics are instrumented UX designers can weaponize the data to support removing almost any feature or information they don't personally find essential. Of course, this entirely misses the fact that power users drive word-of-mouth and adoption >10x more than lowest common denominator users and also have significantly higher lifetime value because they are engaged and loyal (until you finally remove too much advanced utility). I'm all for simplicity - what I don't understand is the insistence on removing features or capabilities entirely instead of just putting them as an option in advanced settings. Different users have different preferences and good UX design can maintain surface simplicity without trashing depth, flexibility and personalization.
Oh come on, the seconds are entirely predictable, run from 00 to 59, so basically storing 10 frames ("0" to "9") in the font and foreground/background colors, the location on the screen into a small reserved buffer in whatever piece of code is responsible for the final screen frame handover, and this could be updated with minimal overhead and without a context switch,...
Yes, it would require a small API addition to the desktop server (wayland, X11, ...) to "register"/transfer/update those 10 frames, their locations ... whenever the user initializes or changes the fonts, font size, ... the context switch can be totally eliminated.
Wonder if it make sense to architect computers with a small sidecar CPU that is not as powerful but it also runs at ultra low power ... so tasks like these can be delegated to it while allowing the main CPU to enter low power state when nothing else is placing demand on it.
Out of curiosity, what would it take to not have the system lose so much energy with this setting? My watch too updates seconds every second. Someone in the comments on this thread has mentioned hardware-based blinking cursors. A computer that could do over billion calculations per second should not need much to render a 30x30 (say) pixel area.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 51.8 ms ] threadIt doesn't because that feature only just release, only works on specific new laptops and most ipmortant: YOU HAVE TO MANUALLY ENABLE IT
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.
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".
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.
[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.
By controlling how usage analytics are instrumented UX designers can weaponize the data to support removing almost any feature or information they don't personally find essential. Of course, this entirely misses the fact that power users drive word-of-mouth and adoption >10x more than lowest common denominator users and also have significantly higher lifetime value because they are engaged and loyal (until you finally remove too much advanced utility). I'm all for simplicity - what I don't understand is the insistence on removing features or capabilities entirely instead of just putting them as an option in advanced settings. Different users have different preferences and good UX design can maintain surface simplicity without trashing depth, flexibility and personalization.
Yes, it would require a small API addition to the desktop server (wayland, X11, ...) to "register"/transfer/update those 10 frames, their locations ... whenever the user initializes or changes the fonts, font size, ... the context switch can be totally eliminated.