Sony and their battery drain troubles

I hate to say this, but I don't know if I can recommend Sony laptops anymore. It appears as if this battery drain issue has been going on for quite some time, yet Sony has made no progress it fixing it.

Even worse, Sony continues to sell more laptops to the unsuspecting public. Even Toyota had the sense to stop selling their cars after they got enough complaints. But, they did try to sweep the Prius' trouble under the rug.

What's with these Asian companies and how they deal with problems?

 

What battery drain problem are you talking about? You need to be more specific.

1. There are reports of battery drain with the machine turned off, but that only is on certain Sony models.

2. There is another report of Win7 quickly using up the battery, but those seem to be where folks installed Win7 but not the required drivers and apps.

3. Then there is an issue of batteries wearing out very quickly and not holding a charge when run under Win7. That appears, at this point, to be a Microsoft issue not a manufacturer one. Again limited to just certain models under certain manufacturers.

So which of those are you talking about? The only one of the three that lays at Sony's feet is the first one.

Gary

 

#1 as it applies to the Sony Vaio CW.

 

I just picked up a NW 380 series laptop on Monday of this week. After configuring it I had it working fine and I then put it in "sleep mode" on Wed evening at 11PM after a full charge. I didn't have a need to restart it until today (Friday) at noon time. When I tried to start it this new PC was "completely" dead.

The tech rep at the Sony Style store indicated that I should not have put it in "Sleep Mode" unless I planned on restarting it within a few hours. He said this was very common for most Vaio's and in order for me to alleviate this problem I needed to either "shut it down" each time completely, or at least put it in "Hibernation" mode which would eliminate the problem.

If this is the case why do they even allow you to choose sleep mode and not hibernation mode in the Power Saver panel. There should be a comment in the Power panel that Sleep Mode is only to be used for very short periods of time.

My frustration is I also have a Dell Studio XPS and an HP DV 4100 and I can put them both in "Sleep Mode" and not come back for 5-7 days and there is still at least 50-70% battery function.
Has anyone else experienced such a severe drain in just 36 hours of using the "Sleep Mode" feature..?

Richardm07 from Boca Raton, FL

 

That Sony tech was pulling your chain. Everyone knows that you can put a laptop in sleepmode anytime you want without having to suffer severe consequences like battery drain.

You've been had.

 

I can attest to #1, but #3 IDK.. I've had my CW for several months and I haven't even registered any battery wear yet. And this is with almost a full discharge every day, sometimes twice in a day. Point is, I use my CW quite heavily and apart from the random waking while in sleep mode and discharging the battery, I really don't have any problems. If I could pinpoint what is changing my power plan settings every now and then (IMO I think it's the Vaio Control Center).. it would be perfect.

 

5-7 days on sleep is a bit long, but should not have drained it.

I have seen Win7 wake up to check or update something and fail to go back to sleep though. This may be what happened to you. Usually this is a power issue with Win7 or a problem with an application, I haven't figured that part out just yet.

 

Actually I have a hunch it has something to do with the Bluetooth not going into a D3 state when sleeping. I actually use Bluetooth a lot and I'm thinking that when another device scans for new devices and discovers my Vaio, it wakes it from Sleep and since the lid is already closed it doesn't register that the lid is closed and doesn't properly go back into sleep mode. My HP that I had seems like it was more aware of it's lid being open or closed, seeing as how it would automatically wake up when the lid was opened. When sleeping the Bluetooth is in a D2 state allowing other devices to wake it. Also, I have automatic automatic update turned off, because I like to manually install my updates. I haven't really had the time to experiment, but that's just one of my theories about why this happens.

 

I agree, I will have Sony's on-line tech support people log into my syst and see if they can make some modifications. There is a lot on this site about a driver called "ISBMgr.exe" that is causing power problems, possibly that may be the answer. In any event no system should die in 36 hours...

 

Hmm, interesting idea, but possible.

 

Yeah, if you want to power off your computer but be able to boot it up, hibernate it if you are going to leave it for more than an hour.

Still doesn't excuse the battery drain during sleep.

Just as a side note, my Dell E1505 seems to have really been affected by windows 7.

My battery life was steadily decreasing over the last 4 years, but just recently it dropped to about 15 minutes. I installed windows 7 about 6 months ago.

This occurs even though I have shutdown bluetooth, so I think that there is some merit to the idea that windows 7 is wearing out batteries.

 

?? Vaio notebooks will come out of sleep just fine if you have it configured like it should be. The battery issues aren't so bad that they'd lose that much power in an hour.

15 Minute battery life has something to do with the battery being 4 years old. LI-Ion battery cells have a stated lifetime of charge/discharge cycles. Get a new battery and you'd have the OEM stated battery life again. And as for the battery drain, it's a simple matter of Drivers. There are obvious flaws with the individual device drivers... IE the Microsoft Bluetooth Enumerator. They simply aren't optimized enough, and coded right for notebooks. I suspect Microsoft is looking into the matter of the manufacturers simply changing one or two things in their driver stacks from Vista, for Win7, and not re-writing them and correctly optimizing them. It does cost a lot of money to re-write drivers, but if they're serious about the hardware and the end-user experience they better do something.

 

Sleep mode isn't off. In sleep mode your battery will drain with any laptop. That is not a problem, it is how it works.

A quote from wikipedia should do here:

The battery should last considerably longer than it would under normal use, but 5-7 days is quite some time. (Compared to perhaps 4 hours?) If the battery wasn't fully charged to begin with, I would find it no surprise it wouldn't last that long. Don't forget notebooks are designed to also be energy efficient under use. You may have a processor that is rated at 45W TDP, but it will mostly just be in idle mode, in which the power consumption is significantly less. The same goes for the other components.

btw. You can check the power draw using an application called batteryBar. http://osirisdevelopment.com/BatteryBar/

 

Thanks for the batterybar lead. I do understand that sleep doesn't turn off my syst however I have always had laptops that only drained 10-20% in a two day time spam. Having the syst completely drain in 36 hours must be the result of some apps that are awakening it from sleep mode thus restarting it and draining the unit. Other than this issue I thoroughly enjoy my new Sony NW380 system it's a very fast high quality notebook and the faux brown wood look (in my opinion) is much more attractive than the very shiny fingerprint prone plastic units mainly avail in the market today.

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions about why my unit drained so quickly in sleep mode.

Richard in Boca Raton, Fl

 

Not at all - its is NORMAL for sleep to use energy - simply because data is retained in RAM (which needs electricity) and the computer is not turned off.

My SZ uses about 4% per hour on Sleep - but then sleep is only meant for short time shutdowns - nothing more.

 

Could you or anyone else who might see this thread recommended an ideal "Power Config" setting so I might maximize the batteries capability on this NW380..?
I have the PC set so that the it goes to sleep in one hour if I walk away from it and if I close the lid it completely shuts down. I have been trying to minimize the # of times I shut it down thinking it adds stress to the syst over the long haul. Thanks for any final commentary on a config recommendation as I haven't found one yet from Sony.
Richard ffrom Boca Raton, FL

 

You can shut it down and start it up as much as you like - over its lifetime it won't matter - I'm assuming you'll get a next laptop in at least 10+ years.

 

On my CW27FX, my battery reading goes very low after powering down my laptop (on battery), waiting a few hours, and then powering it back up. I've noticed, however, that it's the battery indicator that is wrong, since I can run the laptop for quite some time before the battery indicator actually starts decreases. A bit hard to explain, but it sounds more like a firmware/software issue as opposed to a hardware issue.
Unfortunately, this makes the battery indicator useless most of the time, which is obviously a no-go for a laptop. Sony really has some work to do on this model's drivers.