Hwelett-Packard engineers already believe that Windows Vista must be made more sustainable for laptops. While Microsoft promised that the new operating system will have improved power management capabilities to extent battery life in laptops, Vista isn’t quite living up to the promise and the main culprit seems to be the Aero Glass interface.

When Aero is turned off, the battery life is equal as if using Windows XP but when the interface is turned on, the battery life suffers a lot.

However, Microsoft has made some improvements in Vista to improve battery life, among them a better hibernation mode, as well as simpler power management settings. But laptop users who invested a lot in laptops that are able to handle the Aero Glass Interface, are forced to run the equivalent of Vista Basic if they want a better battery life.

HP decided not to use the Vista power management system; instead they created their own power management settings for Vista laptops allowing users to select from “high performance” or “power saver” among other options. Lenovo is also using its own power management settings.

Reports that Vista is draining batteries started surfacing during beta testing last year. At that time, Microsoft promised that the problems would be resolved by the time the operating system is launched. When XP was launched the battery life was worse than when using Windows 98 but back then desktops were the majority computers in use. Nowadays, the only problem is that laptops account for half of the retail PC market and are projected to become the majority for the market by the end of the decade. And consumers won’t like to buy extended battery just to be able to run what they want on their laptops.

Though studies show that Aero is the culprit, Microsoft still continues to argue that there is no application load time difference between a laptop with Aero disable and one without the fancy graphic (or in power-saving mode) therefore Aero doesn’t put too much load on the system. However Microsoft is not deterred by the criticism and continues to tell users “to customize the default power profiles so that users get the most out of their hardware”, as the company said in a statement.

Most likely, Microsoft will improve the battery life over time with the release of service packs and tweaks.