ACPI Vendors Feel the Heat—Again
It looks like the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) consortium is in trouble again. Already feeling the heat for failing to provide a seamless upgrade path for legacy Advanced Power Management (APM) users, the ACPI consortium must now deal with complaints that the new ACPI standard isn't performing as well as expected.
According to notebook vendors that have embraced the standard, ACPI isn't delivering the battery life that most ACPI advocates expected. Some ACPI-based systems are performing the same as or even worse than equivalent systems based on the APM architecture.
APM, the well-established standard used in most of the previous-generation notebooks, is BIOS-based. In contrast, ACPI notebooks implement the standard at the chipset level and control it through a combination of operating system (OS) commands and application functions. Supposedly, the result is more efficient power management because the OS progressively tunes power consumption at the Registry level. However, such an integrated model requires the cooperation of both applications and the OS--and right now, the only ACPI-compliant OS on the market is Windows 98. Windows NT won't gain ACPI support until version 5.0 ships next year. Even then, the results will likely be less than stellar because most software developers have traditionally been slow to code for specific hardware scenarios. A good example is Plug and Play (PnP). Several years passed before developers began coding the various hardware change contingencies in Windows 95. ACPI requires a similar coding if ACPI is to succeed under both NT and Win98.
At least one major vendor, Gateway 2000, is already backing away from ACPI as a result of the platform's shortcomings. Bob Moore, senior marketing manager of mobile systems at Gateway 2000, said the company was not finding any increase in battery life over APM. "Battery life is a very sensitive [buying] threshold," said Moore, who indicated that the company will not switch from APM to ACPI. "If I knew that it was picking up 15 percent to 20 percent, it would be different."
NT users can look forward to an all-or-nothing relationship with ACPI. For reasons that continue to defy logic, Microsoft has chosen not to support APM in NT 5.0. Thus, customers who have legacy APM-based notebooks will still need to look to third parties such as Softex and SystemSoft for power management capabilities. Even worse, Microsoft has tied PnP (especially as it relates to hot-docking of notebooks and similar functions) to NT 5.0's ACPI support.
Service Pack 4 Arrives Early
Most Windows NT administrators have three items on their wish list: state-of-the-art device drivers, PCs that never fail, and service packs that ship on time and are constructive rather than destructive in their NT systems. Microsoft took an important step in addressing the last wish with the early release of the much anticipated Service Pack 4 (SP4) for NT Server 4.0 and NT Workstation 4.0.
To the surprise of many, SP4 not only fixes numerous bugs, but provides much needed enhancements in the form of tools and capabilities that weren't expected until NT 5.0. Given the breadth of these enhancements, SP4 is more like a point upgrade than a true service pack. Microsoft didn't initially intend to make SP4 such an ambitious update, but with NT 5.0's shipping date continuing to slip, Microsoft apparently felt it necessary to shore up the current platform in anticipation of the long wait.
Some NT customers will be delighted by Microsoft's ambitiousness. The infusion of new features will be music to the ears of NT customers frustrated by too many security interfaces and not enough manageability.
Customers concerned with security interfaces will be pleased with SP4's new Security Configuration Editor, a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that provides a centralized interface for all aspects of NT security, from user and group accounts to file- and share-level access control lists (ACLs). With SCE, customers will no longer have to hunt around for the right dialog box to secure a server.
Customers concerned with manageability will be pleased that SP4 includes Microsoft's first implementation of the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) architecture under Windows NT. (For more information of WBEM, see the news story "CA's New Partner Holds Some Weight," page 38.)
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