Battery drain problem on new Vaio SR?

have been reading about this as part of my research and seems to be a problem with sony notebooks esp sz.

any of you lucky ones with the new sr can check if that is a problem

much appreciated

 

it's there. not sure the extent, but it is. It even drained a bit when hibernating. Sucks. Sony needs to clean this **** up.

 

What if you remove the battery when your laptop's turned off? Does the battery still drains itself even when it's removed?

 

you gotta be kiddin ..I was going for a m1330 when I found out about the nvidia issues, now I"m 2 inches away buying a vaio sr ...you guys have saved me a lot of money yet!! thanks & I'm curious to see where this threat goes. But in the end I'd finally would like to get a powerful 13.3 without serious flaws . I hope not the entire new vaio series will be affected...

 

Why not getting a Z if what you want is performance?

To be honest, I'm surprised that Sony haven't solved the loose battery problem and battery drain problem since they were first found on vaio SZ 1. They solved the battery drain problem later with a SZ refresh (SZ6/7)

I hope the Z doesn't suffer from the same problem. We may have to wait for another 2 weeks to find out.

BTW, what's wrong with the nvidia card on m1330? I've never heard of it before.

 

at least the available dell configurations over here in Belgium are still offering solely the nvidia 84 and 86 for the xps series which are faulty: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/09/nvidia-g84-g86-bad
due to that their stock dropped significantly and now: http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/01/nvidia-dropping-790i-mobo-quitting-chipset-business/
They offered a quick fix which will basically let the fan run constantly. As far as I know both Dell and HP are affected by these builds.
Dell is likely to produce new series soon (m1340) which will have the Centrino2 and a newer graphic card on it...

Now, the fan running constantly on these 84 and 86 series with the provided dirty fix, would also drain the battery, but the new vaios at least are running ati.

 

So which of the nvidia cards are affected? Is the 9300 on the Z affected?

 

The 9300 shouldn't be affected.

The fault is weak material used that isn't up to the stress it experiences.

This issue should be sorted in the Z.

(No guarantee though)

 

Does the Z perform better? Not in normal use I think, maybe in games but I don't even know the 3d mark scores.
Does anyone know?

I hope it will be, otherwise, it's better for battery health anyway to remove the battery when working on A/C.

 

Well it should be IMO. At least it looks faster on paper. It's got DDR 3 ram, and the nvidia card's a little faster than the Ati card according to someone else on the forum.

What do you mean by normal usage? Sure, the SR's not slow either. I think any core 2 duo laptops can handle web surfing and word processing fairly well. I don't think anyone would see a performance difference in normal use because we don't usually max out the CPU or the GPU during web surfing, do we?

The Z's 3d mark scores are in the japanese review (I forgot where it is...sry).

 

I couldn't even max out the CPU usage on an SZ71VN/X generating a 28000 * 2000 pixels panorama through Canon Photostich...
Oddly enough I think Empire Earth II caused a maximum CPU usage, it went as it had become boring (from my old laptop).

 

I'm not too sure. DDR3 does not give any performance improvements and I'm not sure the Nvidia 9300M is faster than HD3470. In synthetic benchmarks it might be, but in real life games I doubt it.

It's going to be interesting to see.

Yes I forgot where it is too. But we'd need CPU and resolution to be the same to compare 3d mark 06 scores. I thought they were different to the SR config we've seen.

Not the clearest expression but I meant everything but gaming.

 

That's a lot of pixels...

Is there an official shipping date for the Z? Can't wait for some thorough reviews.

 

Mid august is what I hear everywhere. 18th of august is what dutch suppliers say.

 

Awesome, thanks!

So that's like 2 weeks away.

 

there are a number of lucky members already with the sr. can you check if there is the battery drain problem and if so, how much do you lose over 24h?

thanks in advance

 

I managed to get around 3 hours with my new SR from Newegg. I might be able to get even more if the fan did not run actively. It was weird but the fan would not stop even the temp was not high and I did not do anything other than surfing internet. It was louder than my gf's HP !

 

Ive had battery drain issues with Vaios since mid 05...its really a shame that I've learned to just live with it, I forgot what it was like to not have these issues! its something I just put up with cause I love the vaio line

 

What exactly is battery drain issues?

 

A battery drain issue is what it says. A battery drain issue .

The battery looses power when the computer is completely switched off.
That's about it.
It will differ from person to person and computer to computer, it may be 1% over 24 hours for one, or 5% or 10% for another.

 

I would not call 1% over 24 hours an issue. 5% would be.


I'd still like to know if the SR suffers from this problem and how much % per day it is.

 

I suppose its opinion...

I don't know if there is a "drain" on my SZ7, if yes, 1-2% max and someone said he would call that a battery drain.

But I would say its opinion in the end where a battery drain begins.

 

Well it would be simple to establish what the normal charge loss of the battery is by removing it from the notebook.

 

Very true.

 

So if any SR owner could answer this that would be great:
How many % charge does your SR loose in 24 hours of not being used?
(with the battery in the notebook)

 

i really would like to know too phil

 

Ah, well, I don't know if this helps.

I charged my SR to 100% last night, and turned it off/unplugged it after 2:30 AM PST. This morning I turned it on at about.... 9:30 and the charge was at about 93%.

So that was kind of a surprising loss.

 

My SR probably loses about 8% every 24 hrs. Not a big deal to me, really, but perhaps it would be for someone who tends to leave laptops untouched for a long time. Mine definitely doesn't lose 7% in 7 hrs. like the poster above, though, so your results will vary. Sony still doesn't have a fix for this, though? Has anyone tried their tech support?

 

have the same problem here...

turned my SR off on 48% charge, around 8-10hrs after, switched it on, it's on a measly 18% charge.

my old S series never did that, even with the wifi switch is on or what not...

 

well, also figure booting up uses quite a bit of battery. i charged my batt. to 100% and turned it off on the vaio ultimate setting, then booted up the next morning 8 hours later to be at 97%. however, the other night i charged to 100% but turned it off w/o any battery saver option, and when i booted the next monring it was at 94%

so...i dont know.

 

Ok so 5%-10% in 24 hours that would be the battery drain problem in my opinion.

We've had this huge battery drain problem thread, were there any solutions to this?

 

The booting up is the dodgy bit.
Some people say it can use up to 5% - now on my SZ it uses either nothing or maybe 1 or 2%.

So the battery drain issue is wuite difficult to determine (unless its extreme)

I suppose if you could live without your laptop for a week, here is my suggestion:
CHarge fully, (or to a known level, e.g. 80%) shut down, leave for a week. Then press power switch and immediately plug into AC (as suggested in this forum before by someone else) load fully as fast as you can (go past the login as fast as possible) check your battery charge and calculate an average.

That's the only way I can think of right now.

 

5% for booting is not realistic in my opinion. If people think the booting takes 5% they are actually suffering from a battery drain problem.

I'll test it now on my Asus.

Edit: charge before reboot: 99.1% after: 98.1%

 

How accurate is this charge rate indicator? Isn't there a large margin of error, like the estimated battery life?

 

i charged my battery to 100%, switched off my laptop, took out the battery from my laptop for 2hrs. Then put it back, booted up vista, it was on 94%.....no kidding. Is that even right!?

either booting vista ate 6% of my SR's batt life or somehow the battery sitting on its own for 2hrs managed to lose 6% charge.

 

I don't think so.
They also work on different principles.
Your charge rate, (I assume you mean the %) will look at how much is left in the battery, probably goes via the "Volts". Take a Voltmeter to any normal battery and you can see how full/empty it is.
Your etimated battery life is the amount of tim ethe computer reckons it can go on working under a "current load".
I actually found it quite accurate with 30 to 50 mintues for a 3 year old (used very often(tortured)) Medion laptop.
On my SZ it was quite close also.

The estimated life will go haywire if you change your power consumption though. I.e. switch between office work, HDD intensive stuff, etcetera.

 

Check a few more times, if this continues, have the battery replaced under warranty.

My SZ's battery collapsed after 2 weeks - faulty batteries do occur.

PS: Vista shoudn't eat 6%.

 

How old is your battery?

(by the way, putting it in the fridge can make it retain charge better)

The charge in % is accurate (especially in RMClock), the predicted battery life is an estimate like Detlev explained.

 

as old as my vaio SR, which isn't old by any standards.

and no, i won't be putting my battery in the freezer, thanks for the suggestion though.

 

I said fridge and not freezer, important difference

Since your battery is new it sounds like there is something wrong with it.

 

what made you think it was old though? does the SZ use batteries similar to the SR?

other than the battery draining issue, it seems to be working fine, ie. it seems to hold charge for the specified amount of time...

 

on 2nd thought, could this be anything to do with the OS i'm running?

if this battery draining issue has been evident in all the previous vaios, I didn't seem to have the same with my old S series running windows XP.

anyone else here with a SR running XP-2? What are your findings?

 

I've seen here somewhere before that battery drainage is a reasonably "new" Vaio "feature".
So your old S series might not be affected.

 

I drained my battery until it got to 70%, and then shut down and left it for 12 hours. Plugged in AC and booted up and the battery was at 69%, so I don't think my battery drained. Probably my procedure was wrong, but I really can't test it again over 24 hours.

 

Nothing wrong with your procedure I think.

If you only lost 1% while the battery was in the laptop all the time for 12 hours, you don't have the battery drain problem. Simple as that.

 

Unfortunately that's not quite true. I've run multiple tests with an SZ6 off for less than 24 hours and achieved a near 0% loss. It's up to and after the 24 hour period that something is going on, causing an approx. 2-4% loss every 24 hour timeframe.

 

On the second page of this thread people reported 8-15% in within the first 24 hours. That I would definetely call a battery drain problem.

0% in the first 24 hours and 2% in the next 24 hours I would personally not call a problem.

But it's all subjective this.

 

i agree with phil that booting into an os shouldnt drain more than 1%. is it possible that this is a software problem where there is some conflict between one of the many processes loaded at startup and the battery reading. i say this because it sounds like if you boot it on ac power there doesnt seem a problem; plus it appears to occur in so many different models eg sr, tz, sz, cr

 

I agree that Vista should not take that much battery to boot. Mine loses about 5% to boot vista. Yet, my hp dv9700 does the same too. Now I am not sure if this is really a problem. Anyone has called sony yet ?

 

this really might be a software issue but i can't say for sure.

for instance, i charge my laptop on standby mode till the battery charging indicator LED is not lighted anymore.

I unplug the AC, switch my laptop on, and look quickly at the battery indicator, and it's no more at 100%! or 99% for that matter. It dipped to 96% then 95% in a matter of seconds.

I don't know how that works, if my battery is faulty or not, but as far as my laptop is on, the battery seems to power my laptop on pretty acuurately; according to the battery indicator. Like last night it said 15% 31mins for close to 40mins, so I'm guessing there's something inaccurate about the battery indicator...and especially if you change profiles from max battery -> vaio optimised, I wonder if the indicator changes accordingly.