My Sony SZ and Dell m1330 battery tests

I thought I'd share my results of my quick and dirty battery tests. I have a Sony SZ 660 and a Dell m1330 and was curious which one was better. Both systems have the same processor, led lcd, wireless and Bluetooth on, no power management, (except Sony cpu was set to adaptive) mostly sitting idle with cpu util at 1-3%, time shows start at 100% battery until 3% life.

LCD brightness was full on Dell and full-1 notch on the sony, this is what looked equal to my eyes.

There were a few moments when I saw the CPU util spike up to 20-30%, for no appearent reason. Here are my results.


Sony SZ Stamina (Intel graphics) mode
3 hr 45 min actual (OS claimed 3 hr 56 min)

Sony SZ Speed (Nvidia graphics) Mode
3 hrs 4 mins

Dell m1330 XP
2 hrs 50 mins

Dell m1330 Vista
3 hr 5 min (claimed 2 hr 13 min)

So here is what's weird, Vista lasted longer than XP on the Dell. Surprising. I dont have vista on the Sony so I wasnt able to test. Bottom line, the results are similar with the exception of the Sony in Stamina mode, the extra 40 mins is a bonus! I posted this in the Dell forum as well.

One other note, the Sony takes forever to charge. I think it took 5-6 hours on the Sony and the dell was half that.

 

Anyone know what the cause of the slow charging is?
Is it because of the type of battery or the type of charger?

 

I think xp is usually much more battery efficient than vista... very odd.

 

About the charging. It's certainly not the charger, it can put out a lot but it seems to cap out at about 18W charge and its not changing even if you idle in stamina or play intensive games on speed. So its the battery that is not capable of taking that much charge, why that is I dont know.

 

What exactly were you doing when testing battery? watching dvd, surfing online, etc.?

I think I screwed my battery up when I messed with battery care because I cant get more than 2 hours out of mine on speed mode, vista, and normal online surfing.

Oh well.

 

I was mostly letting it sit idle, but I would occasionally surf the web, I tried to keep it consistent. 2 hrs with vista, speed mode, seems low. I'm going to install vista this weekend and will post my results.

 

I have SZ360. I also got the free Vista upgrade from Sony so I have both XP and Vista.

I can get 4 hours with Wi-Fi on, brightness +3, 16 bit graphics, (dvd-rom, firewire, audio, network lan all off, cpu fan level @ 1, CPU control @ battery life.

Exactly same setting on Vista I can only get close to 3 hours 20 minutes.

 

My experience is that Vista, with bells, whistles, eye candy and indexing, etc., disabled can be at least as power efficient as XP. Which GPU was in the M1330?

I also have the impression that Sony give power consumption more attention than many manufacturers (assuming that some of the know-how which gets my G11 to run to 9 hours spreads to the other models).

As for slow charging: Maybe the low charging current is to reduce the battery getting hot, which isn't good for its long-term life.

John

 

If I'm not wrong vista drain more battery than XP. Because One of them are Vista system requirement drains alot of battery. I get around 3h with Speed mode with mine SZ4. maybe 30min better at stamina.. Still happy about it.. I think I can get much better if the system running on XP

 

Thanks for the tests!

What kind of battery was on the SZ? Was it the one that sits snug with the chassis or the extended one that raises the unit slightly at the back?

 

Anyone care to check their batt capacity with nhc for example? (SZ) 62640mWh for me. And anyone with sz6xx series gotten any battery wear whatsoever? My batt life has increased from typing averaging 5-6h to 6-7h now. That strikes me as a bit odd. I still get extreme hdd activity on bootup for 10 min. Anyone know how to fix this? It's prolly vista doin some trashing or smth.

 

It is not weird. You have not installed the proper chipset drivers for the Dell and it runs at max FSB/EIST disabled all the time.

Had this problem with my loaner E1505 and C2D T7200

 

Sony, could you elaborate? How do you I check if the proper chipset drivers are installed?

 

I suspect that it is SuperFetch at work.

Since it only happens on boot-up, I avoid it by using hibernation (which also gets me back to where I left off).

John