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!
ctoth · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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.
perching_aix · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
atq2119 · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
For the same reason Grammarly does it too, I'd assume.
justsomehnguy · 17m ago
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
foolswisdom · 1h ago
What setting is this? I can only find "Enable machine learning powered autofill suggestions" which seems to have defaulted to on.
> 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.
IgorPartola · 2h ago
Whoa how is this not all over the news at all times?
NewJazz · 1h ago
People are tired of hearing about it. They don't feel like they can do anything about it.
saparaloot · 1h ago
The caring cohort has mortages and kids
jbaber · 1h ago
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.
Teever · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
There was a smart tv that did that with the titles of any media played too wasn't there?
Lu2025 · 1h ago
Any form meaning passwords too?
ape4 · 2h ago
I would check:
- Don't show ads (saves power)
- Don't call home (saves power)
bee_rider · 1h ago
This might be considered if they ever find out how shitty Windows can get before people actually stop buying computers with it.
mouse_ · 7m ago
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.
IgorPartola · 1h ago
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.
lxgr · 2h ago
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.
Delk · 57m ago
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.
pavel_lishin · 2h ago
> 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 · 2h ago
> 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 · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 2h ago
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".
criddell · 1h ago
> 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).
orangecat · 2h ago
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).
GLdRH · 1h ago
Doesn't the blinking cursor tell you it's ready for input and not still running the previous command? Seems useful.
p_ing · 1h ago
...Did you not see that it is an option, off by default?
aksss · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
Of course it's not free - TANSTAAFL - but it should certainly not increase energy consumption by 13%!
Xylakant · 1h ago
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 · 49m ago
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.
HPsquared · 2h ago
And Windows Update burns through an ungodly amount of CPU.
ozgrakkurt · 1h ago
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 · 57m ago
While those same airlines fly empty planes just to avoid losing airport slots.
jasonthorsness · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
And nowadays we got people running Wallpaper Engine on their idling laptops in college classes ;)
blibble · 1h ago
> 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 · 29m ago
"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".
Terr_ · 1h ago
> 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.
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.
pdw · 1h ago
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...
jayd16 · 2h ago
Windows runs on laptops and tablets and such. At this point they probably do a fair bit of that sort of thing.
gleenn · 2h ago
13% less battery time is pretty wild just from updating the screen once per second but interesting to understand why.
> 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 · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
__MatrixMan__ · 2h ago
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".
bee_rider · 1h ago
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.
ramraj07 · 2h ago
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__ · 2h ago
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.
internet2000 · 41m ago
Wasn't that debunked already?
dlcarrier · 1h ago
Is that true? Was Active Desktop just a preview of what's to come?
HPsquared · 2h ago
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__ · 2h ago
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..."
rwallace · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
Does nobody care about just being able to tell the time accurately? 59 seconds makes a big difference for joining online meetings and things.
rwallace · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
No and No, it doesn't.
bigstrat2003 · 1h ago
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.
crazygringo · 50m ago
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.
argomo · 1h ago
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.
erikpukinskis · 1h ago
I just say “one one thousand two one thousand…” under my breath.
endorphine · 1h ago
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.
renewiltord · 1h ago
42 minutes of battery life lost on 321 minutes of battery life is insane.
jambutters · 1h ago
Does this happen on linux? Polybar with i3 has an option to show seconds by clicking the date and time
pdw · 1h ago
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.
dlcarrier · 1h ago
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.
wirybeige · 1h ago
It happens on GNOME at the very least, and I would expect every modern platform is the same way.
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?
They had searching on the web enabled... Pretty hard to search the web using Bing without sending along a search term.
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
Note that that's from 2023. Their legal docs, last updated in 2024, claims 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.
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.
Does anyone know if that is true?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
My expectations of Microsoft software aren't terribly high. I'd say Windows is performant (ie it works about as well as I expect).
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).
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.
Also airlines asking for extra money to offset emissions, just absolute insanity
and building multiple gigawatt consuming data centres to produce AI slop no-one asked for and no-one wants
powered by fossil fuels
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
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.
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.
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".
It is like worry about Carnot’s limit… for a motor boat.
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..."
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.
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.
The compromise for GNOME Terminal is that the cursor will stop blinking after a terminal has been idle for ten seconds.