Does sony still have a battery drain issue like before?

Back when I owned a SZ160 one problem that bugged me to high heaven was that the Sony would drain the battery even when off. Not in standby/hybernate, but actually off. I could have it at 100% charged on Friday and by Monday (no using over the weekend) battery would be like 79% when I got into windows. Do Sony's still have that kind of issues?

 

Yes my battery drains at the rate of 1%/min with vista.

 

When turned OFF????

Gary

 

The BIOS on some machines is capable of waking the machine at a particular time of day. Vista will take advantage of this and wake the machine (even when running on battery) to run scheduled tasks, like anti virus updates etc.

This MAY be the source for what you saw.

Gary

 

Nono. It was an actual battery drain. Compaired to my other notebooks at the time, with 2 days off between a 100% charged state, brought my sony notebook to about 79%. The Dell XPS came up to %95. My Current Asus G1s comes up to about 95% also. Mind you this is over a year ago. since my SZ160, they did come out with many more SZ's. Btw, do they still "shock" you? If you owned a SZ you'll know what I mean. lol

After 6 hours of off/on installing, I'm still getting the tz150 cleaned. So far I installed the computer back to factory, uninstalled everything that I could uninstall from the remove programs, dloaded and installed the current patches from Sony, and now I'm dloading the corrent windows updates. I'm guessing its the 1gb thats killing me. Although its at 84% max phy. ram used, with 200mb for headway its still decent. I wonder how much spiffier will it be with 2gb.

 

Could be an indication of battery ageing. I spoke to Sony yesterday asking for battery life-span, and was told that Sony battery lasts for 1.5yrs on average.


rgds.

 

How do you KNOW it was not due to the machine waking up in the middle of the night and running some update cycle or antivirus scan? This has been discussed at length in another thread in the windows software forum here.

Again, this is only true on certain machines that have a bios capable of waking the machine even with the power off. I do NOT know if the SZ has such a bios or not.

Gary

 

why don't you guys remove the battery when not in use?

 

I don't know about if the TZ unit will do it, but on the old unit, it was done on a clean winxp installation with nothing installed and nothing set to autorun. After hard pushing sony on this, I had them give me another battery when they admitted that the unit will drain the battery when off. At the time, I could have it in a off state and litterally it would drain 1% every other hour or something to that thought. forgot already. would have to do a search for that old post And yes, I knew about how windows likes to wake up and do things. But all of that was disabled at the time. AND its not because Sony did give me a new battery and was doing it on the new battery (Battery status even said 0% used or whatever sony used for the term for EOL).

But if YOU own the unit and not having any issues, then just tell me. Easier than arguing.

 

No argument, sorry it it appeared so. I was just trying to point out that this issue had been uncovered for CERTAIN machines under Vista. This is the first you had mentioned of this being uder XP. So clearly this is not the same issue. And like I said, I had no idea if the BIOS in your SZ model was one that could even wake up the machine when in an off state.

Gary

 

ah ok. I was just curious of TZ had this issue, thats all.

 

No when it is ON.

 

When I turn off my FZ in the night and power it back ON the next day morning the battery charge drops to 89% - 93%.

 

I dont use my battery very often, like one time a week on average...
I use to remove it from latop when at home (when not using it) and put it back when going out...
I use the battery care function, battery is always charged at 80% to be ready for my next use, and, as far as I remember, never had this issue.
Everytime I put the battery back for use and start windows, I get 80%...
All is perfect here...
Oh and about the shocking, if you are talking about the sensation you feel when touching the palmrest, then yes, still there

 

My TZ150N/B has a build date of July 2007 (in case you were wondering, build dates are shown underneath the computer), but I purchased it in December 2007. So the battery has been used for two months, but is definitely older if we go by the build date.

I just tried checking my battery. I had it charged to 100% (yes, I know people say the "magic optimal number" is 40%) and turned off the computer on Friday afternoon and took the battery out. It is now Sunday evening, roughly 48 hours later, and I tried placing the battery back in and unplugged the AC Adapter so it wouldn't charge a single bit while it was booting. It reported 99% charge time once I was able to check in the lower right task bar, but after two minutes it went down to 98%. (This was Power Saver with the optical drive and wireless switch both on.)

In summary, it lost ~1% in a period of 48 hours of being inactive. Your battery results may be better/worse, and I am not sure that if I were to try testing this again, I would get the same results. Room temperature and so many other factors may need to be taken into consideration.

 

Die- The problem is with the battery in the unit. Something electronic would drain the battery so pulling it out would not drain.
Again, I'm not saying the TZ has the issue, just wondering if it did.

 

Ah, I misinterpreted your question then. I usually have my battery out of the computer when not in use.

 

Regretfully it does. I have a TZ91, which drains to 50% in about 4 days. I wonder what is inside that is causing this.

The earlier remarks about windoze autopowering up and doing things is noted, but I find that very hard to believe. Suppose my notebook is closed, inside it's sleeve, inside a bag. I don't ever want it to turn on in this situation. It will fry. And they constructed it in such a way that it cannot be turned on, fortunately.