Hi - new to forum and have a question

Just recently bought a Vaio FW21L and I've noticed that the battery doesn't seem to hold it's charge when on standby and hibernate. I charged it to full the other evening, and then put it into Hibernate. 8 hours later, I woke it up and it was showing 20% battery.

Also, for no reason, when I'm browsing or typing, the page clicks back to the previously viewed page. I'm not clicking on the back button or anything- just does it of it's own accord. Last night, I caught the touchpad with my finger and it clicked back a page. What's causing this?

 

yeah, well, hibernate still uses some battery power. i'd still run a battery tester to be on the safe side.

 

Stand-by uses power, but hibernate doesn't, as the computer is actually turned off.

 

Try to keep you hands away from the tooouch pad as much as possible. Some models are more sensitive than others. E.g, I have the same problem with Tx, but no problem with TT.

 

is this vista or xp?

sleep or standby uses power. hibernate doesn't.

although if you're using vista, i suggest using sleep, if you can (providing your computer sleeps and wakes reliably.

turning your computer on from shutdown consumes battery, a lot of battery in fact.

 

It does take a while to boot up from both standby and hibernate. I've sent an email to Vaio Support to see what they think.

This thing about going back a page- I dont know what I'm doing to make it do it. Happens when I'm typing (like this post) - I'll be typing away and suddenly, I'll hear a click and it's gone back a page, erasing what I've just typed!

 

That is not true. Hibernate also uses power, but supposedly lowest possible amount. Only a full mechanical shutdown eliminates power consumption.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa373229(VS.85).aspx

Furthermore, some studies have found that the power consumption difference between sleep and hibernate are very small. (if you properly allow vista to shut off the devices during sleep)
http://www.terranovum.com/projects/energystar/standby_v_hiber.html

 

The clicking back is to do with the uppermost part of your touchpad acting like a scroll bar i.e. if you move finger from right to left at the top, your browser goes to previous page, similarly moving your finger from left to right cause you to scroll forwards in your browser.

Its a similar concept to the normal scrolling function on the rightmost part of your touchpad - except that just scrolls the page up and down.

I found it annoying initially but its become quite useful (so as long as I use the touchpad in the lower portions). You can however switch that feature off by going to

Control Panel>Mouse>Function & unchecking 'use web assistant'

 

ok... I think I will keep this in mind from now on.. as I've actually upgraded hardware in my laptop while it was hibernating.

 

This is news to me, too. I've always thought sleep uses 1-3% of typical power draw (because of powering parts to wake the computer up in addition to keeping the RAM powered to prevent it from being flushed), while hibernate is essentially a shutdown in terms of power. You can remove power for a practically indefinite period of time and the computer will wake up from hibernation. The only thing that should be powered is the CMOS clock, but that's not running any hardware other than the internal clock. Thus I'm with namaiki on this one.

If you're defining things via power states, S4 and G3 are essentially the same thing. Quoth the great Wikipedia:

S4: Hibernation. All content of main memory is saved to non-volatile memory such as a hard drive, and is powered down.

G3: Mechanical Off: The computer's power consumption approaches close to zero, to the point that the power cord can be removed and the system is safe for disassembly (typically, only the real-time clock is running off its own small battery).

Sleep and Hibernate power consumptions are probably very similar in short periods of time, but during extended periods of time, Sleep will actively drain a battery, while Hibernate will drain it no more than Shutdown would (you lose charge just because batteries naturally lose charge over time at this point).
In practice, my college suitemate has a battery life on his Sony Vaio of roughly 15 minutes. He cannot have his computer sleep for more than 6 hours at a time, else the battery doesn't have enough charge to wake up. In hibernation, he can keep it for days, just like shutdown.
Given, this varies based on how many components are powered during sleep, as you mentioned. But you will still need to power your RAM regardless.

Just my two cents, hope it helps!