How are people getting 4-5 hour of battery life on the new Vaio Z?????

Yah? How???? i keep hearing people getting 4-5 hours of battery life on the forum.

i have core i7 with the 1920 x 1080 display and standard battery.

i am surfing the net and doing some music listening in the background. i've already sorta customized the power plan to CD/DVD drive auto off, process power 1-30%, brightness at 4. graphics card set at stamina.

1 hour 10 minutes has passed and looking at the battery meter, it says i have 67% with 2 hours 9 minutes remaining.

how can i do better than this?

my TZ used to give me 5.5 hours of battery life watching movies straight and 5 hours of wifi surfing and i thought that wasn't good enough.

i thought this Z would give some comparable battery to my TZ, maybe worse than the TZ by 30 minute for movie watching and web surfing.

i m gonna try a clean install i guess and hopefully that will improve it a bit more.

 

The Z is markedly more power hungy than the TZ and features a smaller battery. The large battery on the TZ had a capacity of 8700mAh compared to 7800mAh.the U7600 in the TZ had a max TDP of only 10watts compared to 35W for the Core i7 620m.

The TZ was S-L-O-W even on day 1, the Z is a hotrod

 

you're not alone.. my old Z can get me 6-hours normal surfing and about 1-2hrs watching video. i can't get to reach 3hrs with my new i7 FHD Z using the same routine

 

yah it was damn slow outta the box but i was able to tweak it to be very responsive and its a dual-core. i wish i got the SSD version of the TZ but someone bought me it, so i couldnt' complain.

i decided to upgrade because the TZ couldnt play HD movies or when it did play, it started choking. i didnt like the TZ's glossy screen and as time passed, i found the screen too small.

i was expecting at least 4 hours of battery life with the new Z from the user comments on this forum. i just want some of suggestions to making the most outta the Z's battery.

 

Man, you dudes are bumming me out about my TZ. It's been sitting unopened in the closet for months. Never got around to opening it. I did get the SSD version though. Maybe I should sell it. Do you guys think I can get my $150 back if I toss in the leather case?

 

-Set the switch to Stamina
-Set Win power plan to Power Saver
-Use VAIO Care Long battery life wallpaper
-Lower monitor refresh rate
-Lower screen brightness

 

don't forget all the small tweaks either. Under power saver (battery) i set cpu max performance to 60%.

Screen brightness is something i'm never willing to compromise on. Get the extended battery for honest 4-5hr battery life w/o having to resoort to all these tweaks. I have both std and ext batteries and obvioulsy exe the ext alot more

 

does the extended battery stick out a lot?

 

Stop listening to music and see what your battery life report jumps to. I don't recall seeing anyone post 4-5 hour battery life times watching movies or listening to music. I can get a nice 5 hour battery life just doing normal office work.

See here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/4109797-post10.html

 

You could try doing this as well

1) Put it in silent mode in the Vaio control centre plus the power saver plan.

2) Check your wireless adapter settings in the network settings and power plan settings and at least set it to medium or max power savings. Also, check what roaming aggressiveness is, by default it seems to be set to max power and so does the transmit power setting.

3) Also turn the ambient sensor off when on battery. You could do the same thing for the backlit KB also.

4) I'm not sure about the 5700mhd graphics drivers but you can do this with the 4500MHD and GMA 950. Go to the integreated graphics application in the control panel and put the display power settings into max power savings.


It's also not that hard to upgrade your TZ to an SSD.

 

That doesn't always help - sometimes quite the opposite.
The reason is that for time consuming tasks, you will have to run at 60% speed for much longer, which uses more overall juice than if you would run at 100% for a short time, and then idle for quite a while. When idling, the CPU enters a special low power mode, so 1 second on 100% followed by 1 second of idle uses less power than 2 seconds of 60%.
So only do that if your load is guaranteed to be light.

 

^aka Intel's "hurry up and wait" strategy.

 

Mine (VPCZ12Z9E) gets around 3 hours of battery life on "Power Saver" + Stamina mode.

Not that great. I'm considering purchasing another battery or even the extended battery.

It's a shame, however not that shocking to me. Would be weird if this powerhouse would last as long as an Atom system with approximately the same battery capacity.

 

there must be something wrong. My VPCZ112GX gets around 5 hours on "power saver" mode.

 

My config is almost factory default.
Only things I've tweaked is the Max. CPU to 50% on Power Saver (lower as factory default) and set the Thermal Profile to "Silent Mode".
I've updated the WIFI driver with one that was posted somewhere on this forum, due to dropping connections.

I do have the "maxed out" model (except for the 512GB SSD and Blueray Drive) and extra components do require more power. 256GB SSD is 2x 2x64GB, so the SSD power consumption is likely twice as much as compared to the 128GB SSD model. Idem dito for the DDR memory.
Furthermore my model has a 1920x1080 screen. Don't know if this matters a lot.

A few more components however don't explain 100% more batttery life.

 

@Cusem : depend on how you do use your Z

I got a CTO Z11 with 128GB SSD and i5 540, my extended battery give me 8-9 hours on power saver and stamina with light websurfing and MS office stuff

down to 6 hours with watching HD videos while websurfing

 

What's the usage scenario? Are you running Windows 7 on it?

I can also get 5 hours on my Z122GX, but only if I use it extremely lightly, as in almost min screen brightness, almost idling all the time and very light web surfing (no watching videos at all).

It's a little unrealistic, so a more real-world "light usage" scenario actually gives me exactly 4 hours.

I'm curious how easy it is for you to get those 5 hours.

 

Surfing the web and working on office 2007. If I keep watching videos on youtube specially fullscreen then it drains batteries faster. I'm on Windows 7 Professional clean install.

 

Okay, that sounds reasonable. What was the brightness set to, on average, to get 5 hours?

 

I can get about 5-6 hours too, but with the same light usage you described. That's fine if I'm just working. All I'm doing is using internet, remote desktop connection, and things like word and excel. I keep my brightness at 30% when I'm on battery.

 

If you can get 6 hours, then it sounds like Windows 7 is a little more power efficient than XP.

 

i5 and 1600 x 900 dsplay gives better battery life than the i7 super hi res.

 

one thing that came into my mind is maybe you are using a resource intensive antivirus ? I'm using NOD32 because it has an automatic battery mode for notebooks.

Also what the previous poster said is true. I5 520m + 1600x900 should make battery last longer.

 

If you guys are referring to me, I currently have no anti-virus (I'm still testing the system and finding the perfect setup for myself), it is a Z122GX so that's i5-520M and 1600x900, and I have Windows XP on it.

I'm not overly surprised because Windows 7 is supposed to get better battery life under normal conditions, because it's been optimized to be more power efficient.

 

My W7 experience is the opposite. It kills battery life.

 

Ok, let me rephrase that as "under optimal conditions."