Battery Life up to 4.5 hours?

Did anyone look on the sony website when you click the sz series it now says up to 4.5 hours. Was that recently changed? Just wondering how much battery life they are getting on average.

 

with speed setting (and keep in mind, I had some power issues with stuff, I get around 2.2-3 hours max battery. NOT playing games. And brightness either two bars from highest or at highest setting.

I do notice if you reboot or do aot of things on the laptop, I get closer to 1.7-2hrs.
Playing games I'm guessing its under 1hr.

This is with the standard battery.

This is on par with the s360 I had, but now I'm faster and faster vid card. so thats not bad for me.

I have to try a movie in stam mode and see how that works out.

 

Yeah, seems they changed it recently. For example, if you look into the especifications of one of the pre-configured models they have on there (SZ140PC), you'll see they claim it to be 2.5-5.5 hours under it.

 

Same thing, around 3 hours on intel, 2.30 hours on geforce. It sucks but I can manage with it.

 

Yea they changed it, it used to say 6 hours i think

 

You guys must be doing something wrong,because in stamina mode I get 4:41 battery life.

 

First test:
on stamina with wireless on, working on my conputer, installing and uninstalling lots of software, surfing and so one I had a bit more than 3.5 hours of battery... and the scree light was on 2 bars if I remember well...

WHat do you do guys to get so few battery life?

second test:
still stamina
I'm juste workink on it and I got 3.5 hours with screen on 5, no wireless but bluetooth on and lan cable pluged

 

I dont know how you can use the screen at 2bars. Seriously. On average I have it two bars from max.

I've run a stamina test tonight. I stuck a dvd (king kong)
100% rebooted to stamina 96% Started up dvd and selected play 92%. King Kong movie played for I had the screen on max brightness and sound about 45% I think this was a realistic test. This would put it about 15mins longer than my s360...Not the big difference I would've hoped but it could be this unit. I'm still thinking if I'll need to swap it.

 

did you time this, or did you mouse-over the battery icon?

 

I forgot the number. lol

I dont know how you can use the screen at 2bars. Seriously. On average I have it two bars from max.

I've run a stamina test tonight. I stuck a dvd (king kong)
100% rebooted to stamina 96% Started up dvd and selected play 92%. King Kong movie played 2:35min before it shut down at 3% I had the screen on max brightness and sound about 45% I think this was a realistic test. This would put it about 15mins longer than my s360...Not the big difference I would've hoped but it could be this unit. I'm still thinking if I'll need to swap it.

Hey Neenee- Do you think you can test your hibernation for me?

 

I do get similar times with mine with brightness on 3 bars, wifi on, and sound/modem enabled (everything else is disabled).

 

does anyone have the larger battery? how much time with that? In general if i am going on a long trip and not flying first i rip the dvd's (i throw them out after watching, I'm not a thief). you get at least 30% or more extra batterytime if you dont use the DVD drive

 

Other oddball test: continuous linux kernel compilation (with make -j3;make clean) got me 2:30-3:00h (the margin is because it shut down after 2:37h and one compilation takes about 20mins).

 

os x gets me 2.30 hours on the sz...bah

 

wait did i miss a meeting how do you boot osx on a viao

 

what do you want to have tested - if the battery charge decreases
during hibernate? if so - i'll do that tonight and report back tomorrow.

 

i ran hibernate all night with the open lid feature on. i lost 3% which seems fair. noone has answered my large battery question

 

neenee- Yes, either hibernation or standby. Preferably standby. It seems I get a drain of about 4-5% per hours which seems high

Neilk2350- I guess 3% isn't bad. Standby is whats causing issues. I don't think it sould drain that fast on standby. I retested my Dell and battery drain for standby was 10% in 8 hours. And 1-2% loss on hibernation. So my sony is way off.

 

i'll test stanby tonite

 

Yup. from OFF@100% to 95% 7 hours later. battery is draining even while the unit is off or it takes 5% to just turn the unit on.

 

in standbye or hibernate

 

Im pretty sure he means standby as Hibernate doesnt use battery (as it completely shuts off the laptop).

 

lol. wrong. It was OFF not even in hibernate. I charged it to 100%. shutdown and unplugged it. next day I turned it on and 5% was gone. Unless it takes 5% just to turn it on.

btw, I had two ppl say this is normal.

 

i had a 3% decrease in my battery charge with 1 hour standby.

 

thanks! I guess its a normal thing. THats about 21% in 7 hours. So I guess its normal.

 

its not normal for any other computer i've ever used mac and pc. nor is the lan light staying on after going in standbye

 

Yeah..
The use to display up to 6 hours with the SZ140 and up to seven hours for the SZ160 (which isn't shown on the Sony web site anymore)

4.5 is much closer to what the SZ can really do, but still too optimistic, no way you can do 4.5 hours
JY

 

The standby light is a glitch I think. Like how my battery drained in Hibernation (not even standby) by 30% in like a few hours.
It hasnt done it since.

neilk2350- Right, I havn't seen battery drain like that either except for Sony. But if everybody's sz does it, then its normal.

 

STANDBY IS A DISASTER

I tried standby last night and it completely drained my battery (from 60%). not only that starting up the computer was a huge disaster involving holding the power button down for 4 seconds twice and outlook crashing once. i just think this is flat out wrong (based on other computers). but starstreak you are having the same problem so it must be normal

 

Um...Mine did not crash. That seems bad. Maybe yours crashed because it completely drained?

Someone here said I should leave the battery out and see if the battery still drained. Guess what? I was at 100%, took the battery out. I went back 8 hours later (I had the power plug in my vaio since I didnt have the battery in it) and removed the power, and plugged in my battery and started her up.., My battery was down to 96%. Either Sony's powerup is a heavy drainer or its the battery that sony uses that is bad.
Another thing it could be is the battery indicator is bad. Because while it takes 1min to drain from 100 to 96% (I'm guessing here) from turning on the unit, it takes like 20+mins to charge from the 96-100%. It could take that long if its doing like a trickle charge too, so that too maybe normal.

I THINK I'm going to just keep the laptop and argue with Sony every chance I get. Maybe they will see that if this is "normal" then quoting a 4+ battery life isnt true unless you turn evening down and don't even look at the laptop.

 

i think those indicators are notoriously inaccurate. i would time the entire usage but losing a few points on startup seems somewhat normal

 

I guess yolure right. I shouldnt read too much into it. Just that you would figure my XPS2 w/2.1Ghz, and a 7200rpm drive and a 17in screen would be more power hungry but on a full charge to windows, I still have 98%.

And you are right, I should check if I'm actually loosing battery live. 10% battery loss is alot when you consider a good average of battery life is 2:30min. And 10% would mean I lost about 23mins of run time. I used to because by the time you start it up (1min) and get moving in windows (1-3min), my 100% is down to about 92-91%

 

OK, did final test. I have the wifi on when I did my first test. I turned it off and the 1394 port. It lasted 2:41min not much more.

 

Thats a bloody outrage... we really have to do something about these battery life's. Do you think Vista would fix this issue?

 

Heh, I'm on the beta team but refuse to put it on this laptop. Only because, except for the battery life issue, it's working.

I'm guessing it wont.

I want to startup some sort of petition. But not sure how to go about it. If Sony claims anywhere from 2.5-6hours (if you go with the papers they had on the Sony's web site when I bought my unit) then they SHOULD give us one extended battery. I really doubt 1.5x the life. It would be great if they got that right. That would mean a 2hr 40min battery should last 4 hours? Which is right in the middle of what Sony claims.

Keep in mind I did the test on full brightness and 40-45% volume. I would say thats a fair test right? Not like turning down brightness to 0, no sound, no anything turned on and not touching laptop till it drains...

 

A sony test in my view would be, 0 brightness, no wifi, bluetooth, no webcamera the devices turned off and no one touching the laptop.

Or I suppose they dont even test the notebook they just go with what its "technically" supposed to give. Im going to install Vista on my notebook, see how it goes in terms of battery life.

 

does any notebook live up to claimed battery life?

 

Yeah, but how many notebooks claim 5+ hours and yet "average" use is around 2.5 hrs?

My Dell said 2.5hr and I get little over 2hrs., My old Toshiba was 2hrs but got about 1hr40min. Sony is the only one that the claim is closer to what the ext battery would give you.

 

Oh read "average" in the last one. If you play a game, which agreed is the hardest hitting thing you can do, you'll get around an hour. The 2.5 I claimed was on the "stamina" side and watching a dvd.

 

http://dynamism.com/sz90/specs.shtml

this site says that the extended life battery should last 10.5 hours.

Now divide that number by 2 and subtract another half-hour just for good measure to get a more accurate number

 

aero- Did you do the vista install? how is it?

 

just another update-
I email sony about the issue I was having with the battery and what I thought could be done to fix it.
Sony emailed me back and said that I needed to call in.
I called in, and was transferd from Tier 1 to Tier 2 who still couldn't find a solution to the battery draining so quick. He said he would have a manager call me back later that day.
No manager called me back. So I called them. I got hung up once by the automatic voice system.
I called back again and spoke to someone who said no manager called you and that he will make a note that I still want someone to call me.

That's it so far.

 

I did a very detailed test of battery discharge in STAMINA mode where my Sony SZ 160 ran for 4 hours:

Time % left H/min left Min elapsed
8h50 100 6:00 00
8h51 100 6:00 01
8h52 100 5:30 02
8h56 97 5:00 06
9h00 95 4:50 10
9h05 93 4:30 15
9h09 90 4:00 19
9h17 88 3:50 27
9h21 86 3:20 31
9h26 85 2:55 36
9h30 85 2:58 40
9h36 81 2:52 46
9h41 78 2:46 51
9h46 75 2:40 56
9h50 74 2:36 60
9h58 71 2:30 68
10h04 68 2:24 74
10h07 68 2:22 77
10h13 65 2:15 83
10h20 60 2:30 90
10h32 56 2:40 102
10h41 53 2:31 111
10h45 48 2:20 115
10h50 46 2:15 120
11h05 39 1:41 135
11h12 36 1:33 142
11h20 34 1:39 150
11h30 31 1:32 160
11h40 28 1:22 170
11h50 26 1:13 180
11h55 24 1:09 185
12h00 22 1:04 190
12h05 20 1:00 195
12h11 19 0:56 201
12h20 18 0:50 210
12h30 12 0:35 220

The only problem is that in STAMINA mode half of the applications is not working... they claim that some dll are not loaded.... everything is so slow and full of errors that it is impossible to work... you can only run notepad and write some text... forget about any other application....

Do you have similar experience?

 

Um nothing with .dll issues, but I'm amazed you started with 100% battery.
I charge up my laptop (lets say overnight) unplug it and boot my computer up into stamina mode. I'll aready be somewhere around 95%. Same thing with "speed" mode.
It was funny when he told me to use max battery setting and run my laptop and watch a dvd. I'm like, I can't you turned off my dvd player and you lowered my screen brightness to 0 and you turned off my sound.

 

I do a lot of graphics and 3D work, and I haven't had any issues switching between different graphics cards... and one would think that I would.

 

I use my SZ in 'Stamina' mode all the time and no issues here. In fact, I hardly ever put it in 'Speed' mode...

Javier

 

javylsu- try this, boot your computer from 100% battery(as in boot up without charger plugged in and you know it should be at 100%) and what is your battery like about 5mins? Are you down to 90-95%? Read previous posts about watching movie.

You might get better battery than us, you have a sz160 which I THINK comes with the led display, and shoould take up way less power.

 

I'm not sure what my battery is like in 5 minutes, but all I care about is that I get between 4 and 5.5 hours from my machine. When it's not plugged in, I turn screen down to 3-4 bars (depending on ambient light), I turn off bluetooth, firewire, DVD, LAN, (basically anything I'm not using) and reduce resolution from 32 to 16-bit. This works for me. As far as movies go, I've been on cross-country flights already with my SZ160 and I always have enough to watch the movie and then some. For unplugged movie watching, I keep my resolution at 32 bit, turn all network connectivity off (bluetooth, firewire, LAN, and wifi), and I keep the LCD at 6-8 bars brightness (again, depending on ambient light or whether I'm next to a window that I can shut). That's all the battery life I'm looking for.

Javier

 

actually if you hit 5 hours thats good. Although if saying there are 9 bars, I'm not sure how you can use it at 3-4 bars. Anything but a white screen is too dim except for a dark room.
Even then then, I would find myself forcing my self to what the laptop wants vs what is comfortable for me. Again, each his own. But 5 hours is good.
You are the first person I see that gets that out of actual use. What do you do on the laptop?

 

There aren't 9 bars, there are 8 (or at least the 160's have 8). Do you have a 160? If you don't, keep in mind the screen brightness between the two units is CONSIDERABLE. I RARELY have the brightness all the way up, because I find it TOO bright.

Javier