Sony SR Wrong battery life prediction / estimated battery life problem

Moderator's note: Sony SR can have two battery issues: One is the wrong prediction of left over battery life by Vista. The second is the battery drain issue, meaning the battery looses more charge than normal while the system is off. Let's keep this thread about the wrong 'battery life prediction'.

Discuss the SR battery drain problem here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=282258


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First, I apologise for starting a new thread for this issue. I know that my issue here is covered in several different and distinct threads, but I just wanted to bring them all together, especially with respect to the Sony SR specifically.

Here is my problem. I have a Sony SR 13GN, which is the one with the ATI Radeon 3470 card. I expect the battery to be able to last at least 3 hours, but at 100%, I get an estimated time left of 2 hours and 40 minutes. This is with my disk drive powered off, and my LCD brightness set to a mere 50%. No heavy gaming, just light internet surfing. Should it not be able to last for more than 2 hours and 40 minutes? From other threads, I read that other users have no problems getting the full 3 hours or more.

Second, the battery drain issue. I charge my notebook to 100%, and unplug the adapter, put it into my bag, and bring it to out to work. When I turn it back on powered by the battery, I get only 85% left. That is a loss of 15%. I have tried as suggested, that is, to turn off the wireless switch, but that does nothing at all to help. There are suggestions of physically removing the battery for 30 seconds each time, but isn't that going a little too far, and why should we settle for such a makeshift solution?

I seem to think that while my issues aren't unique, they seem to be rather extreme. Is this an indication that perhaps there is something inherently wrong with my battery, i.e. a manufacturing defect, or am I just one of the unlucky one who got the poorest pick of the draw and should live with it.

I would love to contact my local Sony helpline but I have not been able to find time at all. So any advise here would be much appreciated till I am able to get an official reply from Sony.

 

On issue 1: what performance profile have you set in Vista?

On issue 2: have you tested if your battery also drains when you completely remove it from the notebook? If it does it sounds like you may have a faulty battery.

 

Thanks for the reply.

On issue 1, it is set to "Power Saver".

On issue 2, I don't quite understand what you mean by removing the battery. Are you saying that I should remove the battery completely and then replace it and turn it on again? I suppose you mean to say that I should experience no battery drain if I do so? If so I will test this out soom.

 

on issue 2 I mean switching off, completely removing the battery and let it out for a couple of hours. Put the notebook on AC, put the battery it back and see how much charge it has lost.

If you loose more than a couple % charge when the battery is completely removed it's probably faulty.

Judging by issue 1, it may be faulty.

If you'd like to get mote info on your battery i recommend installing RMClock. It will tell exactly what the remaing capacity is, and how much power your system uses. You could compare this other people so you'll know why your battery times are shorter.

 

My SR's estimator never gets above 3 hrs., but it seems to always beat its estimates (i.e. it'll say 2 hrs. left and then 30 minutes later it's only down to 1:40). In other words, the estimate seems to be (at least a little) on the conservative side. As far as the battery drain, yours seems to be a little worse than mine, so you might want to contact Sony about the problem. If you do, please keep us updated.

 

Are you actually shutting down/hibernating or are you just closing the lid (which just puts it to sleep but the computer keeps sucking juice to keep memory contents refreshed)? If you are just closing the lid, that is the answer. You need to hibernate.

 

I get the same estimate, but it seems to be lasting longer as ccutlip said.

 

To answer TetonWolf, I am shutting down, not sleeping or hibernating.

To PhilFlow, I have done as you say, that is, to remove the battery completely. I reinserted the battery 12 hours later and booted. The battery percentage fell from the fully charged 100% to 97%. Is this a reasonable amount?

I would suppose this means my battery is not the problem, but rather it is the notebook itself that is the problem?

As for the drain problem of 15% with the battery left in, I will contact Sony as soon as I possibly can. It is ridiculous though... my first Vaio.

 

If you booted of the battery then it would be normal yes.

If it would loose 3% every 12 hours (without booting and not being in the notebook) I would think it's too much.

I think so too.

 

I got my vaio sr finaly but I have the same problem like every body here !!!

1- when I turn off the sr with AC power and when i turned my laptop on with battery the battery is 92 %

2- I removed the battery after charged to 100 % and then i turned on my laptop with AC adapter after 8 hours and the battery is 100%

3- I turn off my laptop and after 9 hours I turned it on again with AC and the battery is 100% without any drain

So there is something wrong with software and i know it's Vista problem (just when you boot with vista it took 5-7% from the battery )

coz before 2 years maybe , win XP faced the same problem with some intel processor and then they solved it with patch !!
and if any body has win xp in any one of these models SR or Sz... i'm sure he didn't face this problem

read this
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05...n_xp_core_duo/

 

well i just picked up an SR, the 130E with integrated graphics and it is telling me 2:40 is max......no way. Even if i lower brightness all the way down, the estimate will not change. Any ideas?

 

Calibrate it first by running it down once. I'm assuming you've already set Vista to powersaving.

 

ok will do. thanks for suggestion. never tried that, even with the other sony, do all laptops require running the battery down for calibrartion?

 

You will usually go over what the estimate shows. The battery estimate used in the Sony is unique compared to Dell and other manufacturers.

 

yea i figured, but the integrated graphics one is rated to last 6 hours, so i was quite shocked. that is way over what it was telling me lol. Anyway, prob just a callibration thing, so we will see later tonight when im done with callibration.

 

it shuts down at 3%, is that good enough or does it have to go to 0?

 

Has anyone picked up one of these and installed a lightweight linux distro and gone through with powertop to get power consumption down to a minimum? I'm curious what an SR with linux could get, battery-life wise.
Might also help us assess whether this is an OS issue as suggested.

I really want to get an SR, but this battery life thing has me on the fence. I plan on running linux, though =P

 

You can set it to 0% or 1%.

 

I dunno, I left the battery in last night, and then I turned it on today, this time with the AC power, and it said the battery was at 100% charge.

Then when I unplugged it a couple of hours ago, it went down to like, 94% shortly afterward. It still lasted quite a while. I think the battery detection on these is just weird. @_@

 

i Think the problem is just software problem and how the win detect and read the battery ?? what do you think??

 

I somehow feel the same way as well, that the software may be just glitchy. If we were to conduct some tests we could verify that the battery isn't really losing any charge at all. After all, the battery remaining algorithm is different on Sony laptops.

@ILoveMoogles: I noticed exactly that when I was playing with the SR models at my local SonyStyle store. I don't notice it with mines however.

 

I should imagine that might be the case if you are actually using the Sony battery settings. Some people don't use them and just use Vista's settings instead. I use Vista's settings instead myself than Sony battery settings as i find Vista's more effective.

Has anybody actually contacted Sony about these problems that some people have been having?

 

well did the calibration, but it still shows up as 2:40 at 100%

 

I always use the battery info page of RMClock so I can see the facts for myself. In particular the battery capacity remain and the power drain.

With those two bits of info you can do your own sums of battery run time. It is also easy to see the effect of changing operation (eg backlight brightness) no the power consumption.

Or Batterymon will do most of the work for you.

John

 

That is very low, especially since you have the IGP.

If you want to get to the bottom of this you can install RMClock. It will show you the battery health and discharge rate of your system.

Edit: seems John posted the same tip

 

ok thanks for the tip

 

according to both programs the capacity is 54830 mWh and the discharge rate is 18720mWh. is that normal?

 

So you calibrated your battery and the battery ran out at around 2 hours 40 mins if not what type of battery life did you have?
Also just wondering what power profile and settings are you using? Do you have bluetooth disabled and brightness lowered?

Unless you have the screen on full brightness and have the computer running in high performance mode and are doing gaming or other intensive stuff with your computer then 2.40 mins is just really low for a laptop with integrated graphics and would suggest that something is wrong.

These new processors are meant to be more power efficient. These graphics cards are a little bit more powerful than the x3100 integrated card but still the processor being more power efficient should make up for that.

 

Thanks.

Assuming that 97% of that capacity is usable (ie computer shuts down with 3% remaining) then that's 2hr 50min at that discharge rate.

Other reviews suggest that the P8400 and X4500 combination is quite power efficient, so something is draining power. I would be targeting a 12W (12000mW) discharge rate.

Read this thread. The same principles apply. Start with perfmon and the %C3. This should be 90% or more when the computer is idle.

John

 

What is the "designed capacity" according to RMClock?

Good question. musl, did you actually time how much battery life you got in reality?

 

the designed capacity is 54830 mWh

as for second question, i played a movie to drain battery, it did not even finish. I had everything running and brightness on full. The movie was batman begins (2 hr 20 min) I figured it should at least complete the movie.

 

After calibration, the battery wasat 100% and i had everything enabled (wifi, drive bluetooth etc) , brightess is 4/8 and it was giving me 2:40. I dropped brightness to 2/8 and i got the same time left as when brightness was 50%, the time left did not increase.

on my sz i would use the same settings and get over 4 hrs. Is it a faulty battery? I should be getting at least 4 hrs with those settings, probably more.

the only thing left is to leave it running on the settings i want to use real world and time it myself.

 

So you are saying that "designed capacity" and "fully charged capacity" are both 54830 mWh. This means your battery is in good health.

Now it would be nice if other SR users could confirm that they have the same capacity battery.

OK, well the first thing that I would like to know, how much is the real battery life that you get. Let's say brightness 40%, wifi on, profile 'energy saving', surfing the web you should be getting at least 4 hours and probably longer. I suggest to ignore Vista's predictions for now because they could be wrong.

Right. That's why I suggest to ignore Vista's prediction for now and measure what real time you get.

Also I recommend to follow John's advice (on the previous page) on observing how much your system drains your battery when you change brightness and other settings.

 

my SR battery is 4800 mha !! and i got about 4 hours but the win say it 2:50 hours but it take about 1 hours when it went from 2:50 to 2:49

 

I'm getting around 3.5 hours with the 3470 on the power saver plan, though the estimate never seems to go above 2:40

 

You may want to check your designed and remaining capacity in RM Clock. When there's a large difference you could claim the battery is faulty.

 

I've struggled to get to the end of a 3 hour movie on most notebooks, even with a fairly dim display. I think only the Sony G11 and the Toshiba R500 (both 12.1" displays with ULV CPUs) passed that test, and that was with the display on less than half brightness and all power saving enabled.

18W for power drain on movie playing with the screen at full brightness isn't unreasonable. I suspect the display uses at least 6W on full brightness. Did the DVD drive run intermittently or continuously?

It would be informative to see what power drain you get with 1/4 brightness, energy saving power profile and both wireless and Bluetooth turned off. Watch out for Flash running in an open web browser: It can keep the CPU away when it should be sleeping.

John

 

ok i will try the internet test with your settings as soon as im back at 100%.

and John, i will try your battery drain process.

Thank you all for your help btw

 

Well my request will take a bit more time than John's request, while the intended outcome is some what similar. So I suggest you try John's request first.

PC Pro reported 6 hours of battery life in this review for the same configuration, so I'm curious how far you'll get.

Sony UK said 5 hours.

 

i tried to download the perfmon program, but what is a .tar file? i got it from this page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/perfmon/?abmode=1

the discharge rate is now 20520, and when i change screen brightness, it does not change, should it?

i think you guys are right, it is probably an issue with the vista battery estimate. In 10 min ive used the batteru so far the capacity dropped 1680 mWh. Even though the laptop has been on battery for 10 min, their is only a 5 min drop in battery reported by vista. wierd.

 

so i haven't really kept up with the SR battery problems thread as I'm not sure how bad my battery drains. Although i did leave it on standby last night at 27% and 12 hours later it was at 11%.

i have called sony support 3 times about this issue telling them that i'm losing about ~10% after turning it off/standby just to see what they say.

Each one said it was normal even it if was turned off/standby. Not sure about their logic, but they all said the same thing.

Are people still troubleshooting or is there a definite solution? I read somewhere it might have to do with SmartWi/the powermanager.exe process?

 

Standbye is supposed to take power. If you want to measure battery drain you'd have to completely switch it off.

Are you checking the discharge rate in RMClock and are you giving it a minute to adjust?

Yes it should change. Mine (different laptop, no LED) changes from 17 to 21 watt if I turn up the brightness full.

 

it down to 19440 now, but when i increase to full, then decrease halfway, then all the way down, no change to discharge rate. I give it 2-3 min to adjust.

both rmclock and batterymon tell me the same thing

 

That's very weird in my opinion. Let's see what John says.

You may want to ask some SR owners to confirm if the 19440 is normal at your settings. Maybe in the SR thread.

You could disable BT and WIFI just to see how that influences your discharge rate.

Did yours come with the Atheros or Intel wireless card?

 

intel

got the centrino 2 sticker

 

OK. Good to know. PC Pro had the same config.

How does disabling BT and WIFI influence the discharge rate? (seperately)

Maybe some of the higher battery drain is caused by the Sony bloatware running. How clean is your install?

 

over time my discharge rate decreases. now its 18720. this is really wierd.

well in anycase it has lost 12090/54830. At this rate, i should get 4.5 hrs of battey life. so what is the problem with the battery meter then?

edit. disabling them doesnt change it.

 

Good. 4.5 hours is getting more to what it should be.

I don't know what the problem is of the battery meter, I use RMClock's battery meter to predict my battery life.

Maybe disabling the BT and Wifi in the device manager does influence your discharge rate if you give it some more time..

Other ways of increasing your battery life:
-Use RMClock to undervolt (I highly recommend this)
-Use RMClock to downclock your CPU.
-Doing a clean install. (background processes maybe eating your battery time)

 

yea, i def need to do a clean install, i just need to get dvd's for my recovery disk 1st. 4.5 is not bad with 50% LCD and wifi on. well thats a load off my shoulders, i thought i had a faulty battery

thank you very much, youve been a big help

 

First, perform (performance monitor) is a built-in utility. Start > run > perfmon should get it running. Then you should be able to right-click on the graph window and select Add counter. Then scroll down the list to %C3. This is the CPU sleep state (and includes deeper sleep such as C4 and C5). When the computer is idle the background processes may use 10% of CPU time so it sleeps the other 90%.

Second, the power consumption. Windows power saving does take time to be effective. There's at least 5 minutes lag after switching to battery and an energy saving profile before various things which may use power all decide to shut down. Also, if Windows was recently started then it can take 5 or 10 minutes for house-keeping to be done (I always hibernate between sessions and minimise restarts which avoids a lot of this).

So first you need to let the power drain stabilise and then you chance something and wait a few minutes for the effect of that change to stabilise. Meanwhile, in the background, there may be bits of activity such as some HDD writing.

To get 5 hours you need to have an average power drain of 11W (11000mW) so the minimum power drain with dim backlight, CPU idle, no Bluetooth or wireless, nothing plugged into the USB ports, etc., would need to be 10W or below.

As a matter of interest, what does RMClock report as the maximal and minimal voltages of the CPU (you may need to select mobile CPU on the advanced settings page)? According to the Intel specs the maximum (HFM) should be in the range 0.9V to 1.25V while the minimum (LFM) is 0.95V to 1.025V. A CPU with voltages in the higher part of this range is likely to use more power than one with voltages in the lower part of the range. It's not implausible that Sony selected models with low CPU voltages for review.

John