Sony FS Battery PLEASE HELP!

I have a FS series notebook and I can not help but notice that the battery does not last longer than an hour by itself with a low screen brightness setting and wi-fi turned on. Sony says that it is suppose to last atlease 2 hours, but I am not getting anywhere near that. Do any of you Sony or FS owners have this same problem? What can I do to extend the battery life?

 

I can get around 3 hours while programming and listening to music. WiFi on, brightness 6/9? Granted, this is after considerable tweaking but I was getting over 2 hours from day one.
Did you conditioned the battery?

 

What tweaks did you do to your system. What do you mean by conditioned the battery? Thanks for your time.

 

Conditioning the battery refers to fully draining and charging it without interruption to the full consequently a couple of times (3-5). Only than does the battery report it's correct (full) capacity.

I disabled all on-board hardware I do not need (FW, PCMCIA, Memory Stick, modem, ethernet adapter, the two USB controllers used only when docked), killed all unneeded processes and services in Windows.

The main gain was using RMClock utility to reduce voltage supplied to the processor form the default 1.3 V under full load to 0.97 V and 1.0 V when idle to 0.7 V. This directly reduces CPU power consumption by 25%.
RMClock also allows more control over CPU power management so further gains can be had by using more aggressive power saving scheme.

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by OwcA

 

For devices go to
Control panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager and than choose "disable " from the context menu (right click) for a given device.

For services and other usless programs read the guides at Black Viper. Especially http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm and http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/supertweaks.htm.

Also read the stickys in the Hardware section of this forum.