Disgusting. Upgraded vgn-sz110 to Windows 7 = Get 20-30 min of battery life.

Im not exaggerting these claims in any way.

I have a 4 year old vaio vgn-sz110b with windows xp home.

My battery wear indicator according to mobilemeter is 11% wear.

With windows xp I get 2:30 -3 hours of battery life.

I decided to bite the bullet and finnaly get windows 7 pro.

I created a seperate partition for windows 7 so I can dual boot windows xp/7.

After installing a fresh copy of windows 7 and most of the essential sony programs I decided to test out the battery performance and silly me, I really thought windows 7 would improve the battery performance but the results were absolutely disgusting.

With my fully charged laptop, I unplugged it and watched a movie to see how fast the battery would drain. Normally on my XP OS I would get 2:30 hours of watchtime. When the movie started I looked at the clock and it said 1:20 pm and I took a mental note of that. Shortly after the film the battery baloon popped up saying that the battery had reached critical level. I looked at the time and it said 1:40, I laughed thinking it ws just a mistake. Then in less than 3 minutes my laptop went into sleep mode!

I didnt want to believe it, so I shut down my laptop got it fully charged. Went into the apperance/performance settings and selected performace, changed the theme to the ugly classic mode. I went in the battery settings and selected VAIO ultimate battery. I even made some more tweaks and selected all the battery performance options the advanced power settings.

On top of all this,I decided to retest the battery life by letting my laptop be completely idle, not touching anything, but to occasionally check the battery meter.

And here is what I noted:

11:28 am - 97% - 5:16 Hours left
11:41 77% 2:52
11:43 70% 2:36
11:46 53% 1:47
12:00 3% 7min

With all those settings the best I got out of this junk was 30 minutes

Am I the only one with this problem, what the heck is going on here?!?

 

Sounds like power management is not working on your laptop. It's probably missing drivers for that.

 

This is what I thought too. But I managed to install the program and drivers for vaio power management. When I disconnect my ac adapter it says that the sound/lan/optical is going to be turned off because I have vaio powermanagement. But even with this I get the same battery times.

But when I try to manually change the settings in the vaio management, the program crashes. I guess its not compatible with windows 7, I think windows power management and vaio power management are conflicting each other.

 

Download the Windows 7 compatible VPM below
ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/PUB/VAIO/WIN7UPGRADE/7UPG_VAIO_POWER_MANAGEMENT_4.0U_4.0.0.07060.ZIP

 

Did you upgrade your BIOS to the latest BIOS that was intended to be used for a Vista upgrade?
The 32bit Vista drivers should work.
Do you have any unknown devices in your device manager?
You need to install the Event Service, Sony DLL, Sony shared library.
You also need to install the firmware manually in the device manager.
I noticed a decrease in battery life when i was using W7 on my SZ but nothing drastic like you've noticed. Mine was like about 20 mins.

 

Is this new VPM is compatible with my 2.5 y.o. SZ4?

Thanks.

 

Thanks for the link coolguy, I will try it out and let you guys know if it worked.

Yup, I upgraded to the latest bios. But how can I manually update it through the device manager, the sony utility automatically upgraded my bios.

I did install the event,dll, and library.

I think the fingerprint is missing the drivers, could that be the culprit?

 

This sorta fixed the problem. Now I get 1:30 in idle mode with every settings set for maximum battery life. But this thing drains so fast when I start watching video,wifi, etc.

Are there any other files that may help with power management? Will installing the windows 7 version of vaio services instead of vista help this?

 

What GPU driver are you using? You can try this VPM too ftp://ftp.vaio-link.com/PUB/VAIO/ORIGINAL/VAIO_POWER_MANAGEMENT_4.0_4.0.0.08240.ZIP
Check the advanced power options too.

 

Hey,whats the difference between these two vpm programs?

I already tweaked the advanced power options.

Im using intels 945 express stock video driver that windows 7 installed.

Thanks