Horrible battery life on SZ?

Hello folks. Have an SZ, downgraded to XP with all the software/drivers that should have been loaded. However my battery life is total crap

Even in stamina mode, bluetooth disabled, and brightness toned down a few notches, it seems like I get about 1.5-1.75 hours. If in speed mode, then even less

that's not having a DVD running or anything else... basically I wouldn't even be able to watch movie if I wanted to

I know there's been comments that battery life won't be as good with XP,but this seems a little low

Any suggestions before I call Sony?

Thank you!

 

I'll be interested in these replys, my sz120p battery does seem to charge anymore.... run entirely on ac now

 

there must be another underlying problem, probably with your battery, my sz6 with XP gets the same as it did with vista, 4.5-5.5 hrs

 

4 to 5 hours??

Im getting 3 hours max with only internet browsing. Have you installed Sony's Power Management?

 

Hi, guys!

Let me tell my story - it might be useful for someone...

I used SZ460 with Vista, can not say it is terrible - something I like more, something I hate, but I had to move to XP because Vista was not helpful with my work requirements...

So I have downloaded all XP drivers, got an XP installation disk, install XP with all drivers. Everything was OK. But when running on batteries I noticed that I have only 3-4 hours compared to 4-5 on Vista. I started to investigate the problem. And finally I resolved it - now I have 5-6 hours on battery.

The problem is in the camera driver. I do not know the details, but turning off the camera, the composite device and the whole USB2 controller helped a lot (but in this case the USB ports did not operate in USB2.0 mode). A bit of googling and I found KB918005 patch from the Microsoft.

So if you want to improove your battery life after downgrade to XP you need to install the patch (KB918005). Then go to the Device Manager find the Camera Device and Composite USB Device (the camera is attached to it) and disable camera firstly and composite device then. That's all.

Of course you will be unable to use your camera, but I have 2+ hours more battery life now and if I will need to use the camera - several clicks and it is ready to go.

Regards,
Oleg
P.S. I use the Russian XP, so there might be inexact translation of some device names.

 

I use to get 4 hours on my SZ260 till a month before it crashed.
The battery started to run hotter and it only lasted an hour or two.

About a month ago I had total failure and Sony replaced my MB 2 times.
The first time I had awful battery life and the heat from it was extremely high, almost too hot to touch. It also would not run on battery only AC.
The second time Sony replaced the MB, everything was fine. The notebook hardly goes up in temp at and the battery started to get 3+ hours (same battery) with the same settings as before.