General wear and tear question regarding laptop

So my PC broke maybe around 6 months ago and I never bothered to get it fixed and just started using my Sony Vaio VPCZ117GG : Z Series.

Specs are;

Intel Core i7-620M Processor 2.66 Ghz with Turbo Boost up to 3.33Ghz, 8GB RAM & Solid State 265GB with Windows 7 64-bit, though you probably already knew that - just incase.

Anyway I'm not playing games on it at all and I'm only using it for websites on Firefox (email, forums, facebook etc). I probably have to charge the thing 4 times a day or something. It's something I've always regretted buying, I wish I just got the i5. I try to get it fully charged, and then I take out the charger and allow the battery to drain until it's ready to be charged again and I repeat that. I don't just leave it plugged into charge all day or randomly charge it.

Because I'm basically taking the laptop with me everywhere now and using it at work and at home for my personal computer I'm worried I'm doing it damage by using it so much? It's always humming as it does, and the left side can get pretty hot, but I don't run games on it or push it to his max. I know I'll probably kill the battery one day but I'm just worried about the processor and everything else?

So long story short, basically, am I harming my laptop by doing basic tasks on it all day and having it turned on for like 15 hours a day?

Please nobody who is overly protective of their laptop and cleans it 5 times a day and does god knows what else to it reply, I don't want to get freaked out by your opinion... >_<

Thanks in advance.

 

No need to charge it the way you are doing it. Just charge it when you are using it.. randomly. For me with an i5, battery might last three hours with normal use with the standard battery.

You can use your computer as you wish. Check CPU temp with CoreTemp and nVidia GPU temp with GPU-z. Should be okay if your temps are lower than around 80C.

Your computer should be fine. I leave mine on pretty much 24-7 and it's fine.

 

Thanks Namaiki. I do that with my PC but because it's a latop and smaller everything I just wondered. I mean as far as I am concerned it's designed to recieve a flogging on some high end games, which I don't even play, but the thing gets way to freaking hot to even be a laptop, and the battery life is an hour or so also... so it's a complete joke.

$5KAUD of burn your lap and die on you while on the train power!

Oh well it's still pretty kickass.

 

It's designed to be used, so use it all day if you have to and stop draining the battery. Just leave it charging!

 

Same specs as you with I7 620M and on battery mode with battery protection to 80% load, my Vaio runs with stamina mode and reduces CPU power about 3- 4 hours web surfing, office tasks...

When I am at home the Z is always plugged in and after 1 1/2 year battery is like new

 

There are definitely running some processes on max load. Use your task manager to check out which they are and kill them. If you need them running, search for solutions. E.g. paste them here so we can help you out. Any Z should be running at least 3 hours idling without getting *hot*.

Also add the adblock addon to firefox in order to get rid of these ridiculously bad coded flash ads that burn up your battery juice quickly.

 

^ Also I recommend you use a program to check the battery discharge rate and wear. The program I use is called BatteryCare, but there are loads of them about. With brightness at 1/8 and the computer idling (and a few power saving tweaks), I get a discharge rate of about 11-12W with wireless on, and 9-10W with wireless off (I also have an i7, 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD). My wear level is 12% after a year and a half of use.

 

Ashers, do you use the Vaio Battery Care function? Also which brightness did you set for ~10W idle?

 

^ I was a bit wrong with my estimations, and I'd forgotten about some of tweaks that the PC applies on battery power. I've just done a test and reworded slightly. As I write this, the PC is using 11W. That's brightness at 1/8, wifi on but bluetooth off, refresh at 40%, graphics in stamina. I've modified my previous post accordingly. The "batterycare" program mentioned above also automatically does a few changes in battery mode to save power including turning off some services and disabling aero - what difference that makes, I don't know.

I do use the sony battery care function to charge up to 80% (which I hope has reduced the wear) but that won't impact the discharge rates.

 

If you set Battery care to 50% you can leave it plugged in without harming the battery. That is where these batteries like to stay. Leaving it at 80% and plugged in is probably easier on the battery than all of that up and down you are giving it. My SZ is several years old at 80% plugged in most of the time, with no issues.

This is exactly what battery care was designed for.

 

Check your task manager, when i got my Z1, I was always bugged by a problem with something that was always taking like 20-30% of my CPU power (Presentation Font Manager) or something. Apparently it's some weird Win 7 thingy that affects only a very few people (no one on here knew what was up, so google was my friend). Either way, I'd also suggest under power management, for "power-saver" i'd set maximum CPU frequency to 99% because your chip only turbo boosts to 3+GHz if it hits 100%, so by setting at 99% it doesnt turboboost (raises my temps about 5-10C depending on ambient)

 

Thanks for everyones help so far I really appreciate it. Maybe I was a little off but from general use it is around 2 hours or something, but that's on balanced. I don't use power saving because it makes my taskbar white and I don't like that. So I can't really complain, but it's still not much time.

It does get quite hot on the left hand side where all the heat pushes out of it, and can get hot along the top and bottom of the left hand side so what are my options in trying to reduce this heat, ie performance or someone mention a battery percentage? I know about Silent Mode but that's about it, would anyone mind please giving me some step by step options in reducing the power consumption/heat/processing etc?

Here is a screenprint of my task manager, I don't know what half of it is so I generally don't touch it. I know Norton probably is always running things in the background even when I'm not using it but surely the laptop can handle that.

thanks again.

 

Hey Achusaysblessyou, thanks! I didn't see your post and I'll check into that stuff now. if you or anyone else has any ideas how to reduce to heat and power consumption that'd be great, thanks!

Edit: So are you referring to changing the Max Processor state to 99%? Cheers.

 

You don't mention whether you have it in 'Stamina' mode. From the amount of heat you describe coming out of the fan port, I'm just curious if you have the switch set to 'Speed'.

Also, I second everybody's suggestion that you leave it plugged in when not travelling around with it. The thing that wears out a Li Ion battery is the heat generated on charging, you only get so many of those cycles.

Li Ion batteries are not like lead acid batteries or NiCad batteries, in that they (LiIon) are not affected by what level of charge you are at. Instead they degrade from heat generated during the charging cycle.

 

Actually...
Lead Acid (like in a car) prefers being fully charged all the time.
Li-Ion prefers to be charged at 50% all the time. They are shipped at 50% because they can settle into a dormant state at that point, you sometimes have to cycle them a bit to wake them from this state.

In either case, the further you get from their preferred spot, the harder it is on the battery. Heat is a killer, but leaving a Li-Ion at 100% all the time is also very hard on it. Which is exactly the reason for Sony Battery care.

 

actually the purpose of the Sony battery care is to limit the heating. I am not aware of any electo-chemical or mechanical preference for 50% in LiIon. What mechanism are you supposing for this 50% theory?

 

Just figured out how to do this, thanks! I've done it. I've also made sure I'll use it from now on in Silent Mode + Power Save (Balanced) or whatever. Anything else you could suggest? Someone also mention setting the CPU to 99% so it doesn't jump into turbo boost (which when it does it sounds like a plane taking off) but I'm unsure exactly where to go to do this, any chance for a step by step?

Then I think I won't have any more problems.

 

click on your Battery Icon in the system tray -> More power options -> More plan settings (for which ever plan) -> change advanced power settings -> Processor power management -> Maximum processor state -> 99%.

If you have the Intel Turboboost Monitoring gadget, that'll show you when your Z is turboing, and if you set it to 99% it doesn't turbo.

 

The best way to find out which processes are draining the battery the most (after lowering screen brightness to the lowest you can stand, turning off Bluetooth and Wifi whenever you're not using them, leave all USB ports unplugged unless you are using the attached peripheral, leaving the DVD drive empty, lowering your max cpu on battery not only below 100%, but even better on 5% - you'll doubtfully notice any performance change for most applications, and see what effect on the wattage each change has using battery bar or an equivalent battery measurement app.

And then save an extra 10% or more from this simple, often overlooked technique: using the "stamina" setting - the Intel integrated gpu, go into the Intel GFX control panel (Control Panel->All Control Panel Items -> Intel Graphics and Media) and change the Color Quality from 32 bit to 16 bit and the refresh rate from 60Hz to 40 Hz.

If you do all of the above while on battery, and maybe a few more that I haven't listed, you should be able to get at least another 1 hr of battery life. Also, if you only have a standard battery, the extended battery for the Z has 50% more capacity. If I am careful, I can get 5-6 hrs on a fully charged extended battery, easily 10 hrs with two and I own two extended batteries and one standard (just to make it lighter when I don't need to run very long on battery). The extended batteries are about 3/4 lb heavier than the standard, but it's not like they are adding all that weight to the laptop at once. You can always find a place to store them where the weight won't be noticed.

Sorry for rambling,but there's some useful stuff in there.

 

your taskbar white...

I think that's Intel's power saving tech for their iGPU... I'm not at my Z right now, but when I get the time i'll tell you how to turn it off (goes along the line of go into graphics properties for intel card by right clicking desktop, then go to the power saving or something, select battery and disable the power saving option)

 

Might also partially be caused by transparency being disabled for the taskbar.

 

Max charging causes heating, more than a lower level charge, but that isn't the point, especially when you have a heatsink half an inch from the battery that will heat it regardless of what the battery is doing.

As to the 50%, I've seen it on quite a few manufacturer sites in regards to shipping and storage.

A quick Google search turns this up as the second hit and meshes with what else I have read on it from experts and manufacturers. I'm sure if you look, you can find more to back it up. Search for "li-ion storing".
How to Store Batteries &ndash; Battery University