SZ4 - battery life between Vista and Win7

Thought I'd update my SZ4MN/B from Vista to Windows 7 and noticed some interesting "stuff" in terms of battery usage. When it was running Vista, the battery would last maybe 20 minutes before shutting down the machine - even BatteryBar said it'd last only 30 minutes, but that wear was only 7.5%. Since it is almost 4 years old and has lead a rough and heavy usage life, I thought that perhaps the wear was being reported incorrectly and that the battery was truely broken. The machine has been running at high CPU usage with big heavy work applications on it, so constantly hot and plugged in, which is probably the worst thing to do to a battery...

Now I have slung Windows 7 on it, I just ran it down completely to calibrate the battery (yes, I know some people say that is bad), and the machine lasted a bit over 2 hours, which isn't far off what it should do! It seems that the 7.5% wear isn't that far off the truth. I am pleasantly shocked by this and disappointed at Vista's lack of recalibration (tried all the tricks the internet has to "reset" the battery over the last year). I'm curious if anyone else noticed any changes like this when they upgraded?

PS. Another thing I saw was that the charge rate fluctuated wildly, from 70,000 mWh to 5,000 mWh so that the estimated time for recharge was massively off - I always thought it was meant to charge quickly up to 65%ish then slow down progressively until fully charged?

 

When I first went to Win7 (beta) my battery life was almost the same.

As I developed the guide, and learned more about Win7 and such, I actually managed to squeak out an extra hour from it. Under light browsing and chat I could get 4-5 hours, if I was extremely careful I could get up to around 6, but this took some serious tricks to do.

Keep mind, the later SZ's came with larger capacity batteries, and more efficient components. I swapped some of those parts, but I don't know if they helped or hurt really.

I think I could get another 30 minutes or more with the netbooks ssd, and probably another 30 by putting the netbooks wireless card in. Both of which are really efficient. The card however isn't exactly lightening fast.

 

Is there any sort of util that works out how much each component is drawing from the battery? I use BatteryBar to give the overall discharge rate but I'd like to see what is causing how much discharge. I've been playing on a Vaio YA recently at work and trying to preserve its battery and the drain seems to scale in a predictable pattern in terms of what I have running, etc. but this machine seems to jump all over the place in both discharging and charging. I have a sneaky suspicion that is due to the age and maltreatment of the battery, and as you say, the older components can have a much larger drain than newer ones

One good thing I've noticed is that under light use (browsing, IM) Win7 stays at about 55C, whereas Vista could get itself up to 80C at times.

 

You can use battery bar and watch the drain as you enable and disable things. As far as I know, that's it.

Don't think that all newer stuff is more efficient.
Not everything has gone down in power use. CPU's have gone down on idle, but peak power remains higher than ever. ad video cards... They are at their peak, with many using much more than the cpu.

 

Yeah, trying to do that, but whereas on the newer YA I can see the difference having an application open makes to the baseline drain, unfortunately the older SZ's drain changes a lot. I've just pulled the lead out and in 5 minutes it's down to 86%, discharging at 22,000 mW, but I know that when it gets to about 70% it will stay there for the best part of three-quarters of an hour before dropping rapidly through the 50% range. Like I said - not a well looked after battery so I'm not expecting much! Still, not having a steady base discharge rate makes it tough to work out...

NB. in the second 5 mins I've waited writing this, it's only dropped to 81% though discharge rate is apparently the same as before! Not a complaint, just a realisation that this poor old dear has been worked hard all its life. Not as bad as my 2003 HP Pavilion... battery wear is 78% on it, and it only lasts 5 minutes on battery!