Battery life of vaio z on standard battery

Hi
I m thinking about buying a vaio z. But confused between which battery to choose. How does the standard battery life of i7 version compare with extended battery. does the bigger battery make the laptop look ugly

Also i talked to the sony sales guy and he said they dont do accidental damage cover for anything over £2000. Is tht true, can any1 suggest any good company tht does accidental and theft cover??


Any tips on getting a discount on the sale, like dell gives quite a bit of discount if bargained

 

See #2 in the Z FAQ regarding the battery's effect on how the laptop looks: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/477806-sony-vpc-z11-frequently-asked-questions.html

I would also do a search of the Owner's Thread for information about battery life differences as well as discount options. There's tons on both of those topics. Discount discussions were primarily for US and Canadian customers though. I don't recall seeing much about the UK (I'm assuming that's where you are).

Anecdotally, I can get about 5 hours on the standard battery (i5 though) doing office work with the brightness level at 30%. I believe the extended battery adds about 2-3 hours to the life.

 

5 hours with standard battery, wifi on and Internet browsing or word processing. Less if your processor throttles up for multimedia. I have the i7 and 5.5 hours is pushing it.

Extended battery is 50% more

 

I get 4 hours using Windows XP, wifi on, brightness on level 0~4 (out of 8), doing general browsing.

 

What about the accidental damage cover

 

Bump ...............

 

around 4h for me.

 

Can't you just get accidental loss and damage cover on your home contents insurance? That's what I do and I generally add my laptop as a named item. Note that loss and damage can happen anywhere in the world and it's still covered on your contents insurance.

 

about 4 hours with less than half brightness, Wi-Fi on and browsing in power saver setting. No more than 4 hours at all, no more than 1hr 30min with high-performance maximal setting running some videos or gaming on the nvidia 330m. Standard battery.
i7-640m, 8gb ram, 256gb (128gb x2).
I always have gps and bluetooth Disabled as well.

The battery life isn't that great from what i could tell you. This is a new Z13 built in december. I have 100% battery fitness giving out 59500 mWh designed capacity at the moment.

 

Same thing here - approximately. When you disable wireless and run on ~25% brightness (office/pdf etc.), you can squeeze out like 5,5-6 hours. When you turn on wireless, you can really "feel" that the wifi card draws a whole bunch of milliamps. Let's blame intel for that!

I would be interested in reports how much the 6300 card draws.

 

So how much bigger is the extended battery compared to the std. one?