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    Gremlins have stolen my SZ's precious power! Vista Gremlins!

    Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by koopa, Sep 6, 2008.

  1. koopa

    koopa Notebook Enthusiast

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    Arrgh, it's 5am and I'm going to bed after spending like 10 hours trying to find a solution to this problem.

    In XP, I could get my SZ down to 6W (10 hours battery life, standard battery), and with a brightness of 3 (and all other 'ultimate vaio' options off), I could get 8.5W reliably (7 hours battery life).

    Now on Vista I rarely drop below 10W (5hours), and in practice get 2-3hours... indexing has been disabled, windows update has been disabled, aero has been disabled (de-facto by the 16bit colour setting). I can verify that it is achieving C3E state most of the time (and C2E and C1E when appropriate). It might be achieving C4E, but I can't verify that.

    The problems seem to be the following:

    - RMClock insists that the "CPU Load" never goes below 50% (even though the "OS Load is <2%). Strangely, it pretty much only does this when on battery power (in ANY power profile / RMClock profile), and goes back to 5-10% above "OS Load" when powered? Although I can not see an effect on CPU temperature (so not actual cycles / energy being consumed), on the occasions that on battery power CPU Load drops to OS Load, I am suddenly achieving my <8W goal on Vista (so something is not powering down because of falsely interpreted CPU loading data?).

    - The hard drive never spins down... it is always writing to C:\$LogFile (NTFS Volume Log), C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\NTUSER.DAT, C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\ntuser.dat.log1 and C:\$Mft (NTFS Master File Table). The amount of data is trivial, but constant. This is with WiFi/Ethernet/Bluetooth disabled (perhaps Alcohol 120% / VMWare have something to do with it?)

    - My battery has always had a Designed capacity of 57720mWh, Fully charged capacity of 54320mWh, and this hasn't budged over 18months (suspicious?). Now I find that the figures aren't adding up... somewhere between 60% and 20%, it goes from 3 hours remaining to 1 hour remaining in 40 minutes...? I have run the laptop out of power to emergency hibernate many times, is there any other way to recalibrate or test my battery (it is genuine)?

    What this means is, I go to watch a movie on my SZ3 with friends (AVI from HDD, 20% CPU usage on 1GHz Ultimate Power + Sound, half volume, 7 brightness). I'm drawing 14W, and my battery estimation is 3hrs+. After about 90mins of movie watching, the battery is down to 10% and it hibernates... not impressive.

    Please, anyone, hints, tips, ideas where to look for the gremlins stealing all my watt-hours, anything appreciated!

    EDIT: Oh and this is with VISTA SP1 (all patched up) and in Stamina mode with an SZ 3 series, C2D 2.0Ghz(4Mb) and 2Gb Ram
     
    koopa, Sep 6, 2008
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