The official VAIO Z battery drain thread

Hang on - if I understand this right, wouldn't it mean that you could stop the battery draining after hibernating if:

a) You removed the battery and reinserted it
b) You turned on the computer and turned it off before the resume state

???

I understand the lunacy and the bug, but I'm trying to figure out a sane workaround.

 

Hm - I found out that the Z wont start when I open the lid if I remove any power source during hibernation/shutting down. It will only work if I let the battery or the power cord plugged in.

Can it be that this feature consumes so much energy?

 

vtraveller: No. a) was only a suggestion and someone said it probably wouldn't work (though you are welcome to try it.

The problem is that some devices are still consuming power once in the hibernation state (your computer appears to be off). If you force these devices to be off, then they won't drain the battery. However, i don't know how to do this short of disabling them in task manager.

Its quite obvious that the fingerprint sensor and webcam are the cause of at least some of the drain (as there power states are NOT off on hibernation). Possible other cause is drain a faulty driver for the sound card. Possibly bluetooth contributes too.

Base: I have no idea what you just described...

 

Hm - ok - my english is not the best

Again - It is supported by the Vaio-Z when you open the lid that the Z powers on (from hibernation or complete shut down) - right?
But this feature only works if you do not remove any power source during the laptop is turned off (of course this doesnt count for stand by). The battery have to be plugged in or the a/c have to be connected until you are opening the lid so that the Laptop will go on automatically afterwards.
When you remove the battery and a/c and plug it in after a while the laptop will not go on when you open the lid! You have to press the power button instead. In this case this feature is turned off.

My guess is that maybe this feature requires some energy und causes some auf the battery drain problem.

 

Another successful hibernation, disabled the gigabit lan, hd audio and biometric sensor. Turned off wifi and bluetooth before hibernation.

Let my computer from yesterday 21:30 to 20:15 today and my battery remained at 80%, note that i ve the 80% battery care enabled.
Now just unpluged the power ac to see if battery won t drain fast to "ideal value" arround 70%...

 

reports here, after 10 minutes my z battery percentage dropped from 80% to
75% on stamina battery mode with internet browsing but the hdd activity remained busy maybe windows update force to drain too fast, anyway it s better than 70 or 65% i had overnight
Obviously there is something wrong about device sleep state. from my previous report, i used to only disabled the hdaudio and had the same result.

A driver update and vista kb may fix the drain. The fix issued by microsoft have to be manually install, i never found him in my automatic update.

 

Hmm yes. So that seems to indicated that maybe removing the battery and AC forces all devices to the off state. Do you has the battery drain problem? Is the drain problem fixed if you remove the battery and AC for 5mins and the reinsert the battery only and leave it for 8 hours?

I enabled HD Audio last night and did a shutdown on the vaio z. This resulted in no more battery drain than last time (plugged the AC in before starting up, 99% once vista is started). I'll test hibernation tonight

Podam: What vista kb is this?

 

I have now had my 590 Z for a little over a year. I have not had bothersone "battery drain" issues, but I can report that the capacity of my extended battery has declined over this period. The "maximum battery" setting on my original battery shows 4 hrs & 20 minutes of life when fully charged, while the new extended battery I just purchased shows 7 hrs and 10 minutes of life when fully charged.

 

That was my initial theory; shame it's not possible to do this without fiddling with the battery.

I'm just too impatient for Sony to fix this and the NVIDIA Brightness Graphics Driver problem. Bet they don't release a new driver pack on the 22nd Oct.

::grumbled::

 

Both S4 and S5 map to D3 for Realtek High Definition. So, that's not it.
But now I'd like to check other devices.

Actually, Realtek supports only D0 and D3 as far as Power Capabilities show in Windows XP.

 

zugzug: Yes that is what it says, however there were claims that while the driver said this, it wasn't actually doing it.

However, i can confirm that on the Z i have access too, there is no battery drain for either hibernation or shutdown with the Realtek audio enabled (this is in vista of course).

So now it is either webcam, fingerprint sensor or bluetooth.

Out of interest, is anyone experiencing the battery drain with the extended (large) battery??
I Ask because it seems initially the Z draws a lot of power. Eg, its off and the battery is charged and its plugged into AC. When i turn it on, the battery charging light turns on....
Seems very odd.

Anyway, i'll keep playing. Maybe someone else with a Z can follow what i did on page 45 and see if it stops the drain? would really appreciate it!

 

in SR with extended battery the drain is exist with same amount as standard one .

 

My Z is with extended battery, just FYI.
I wonder if it would be possible to spot anything in DSDT regarding devices behavior in shutdown, hibernation, and sleep.

 

Can I have some more feedback?

 

Well enabling the finger print sensor resulted in no more noticeable drain (99% charge) when starting up from AC after having been disconnected from AC for 8 hours (it was hibernated during this time)

Tonight i'll enable the webcam. The following night i'll leave the bluetooth/WWAN switch on, and then after that i'll enable the bluetooth PAN.

But given i haven't seen any cause of drain yet i'm starting wonder if the "drain" i've seen is simply the laptop using 3-7% during a power on...

Ohwell, hopefully i get somewhere.

ductrung3993: Sony are terrible. This is just an excuse for sloppy drivers that they can't be bothered to fix. They haven't even set up the free win7 upgrade registration page in Australia yet
Do you want to disable the devices i listed a couple of pages back and see if it fixes/improves the drain?

 

As someone who uses my Z less frequently than my desktop, I can say that someone with drain will experience cumulative results over the course of many days. I use my laptop maybe twice a week and if it sits for 4 days from a full charge, I'm at about 60% when I boot up. I do agree that start up does use about 3-4% from what I've seen just restarting the machine but it's not all lost to startup.

I normally store the laptop with the battery disconnected. Last night I put the battery in in the dark and notice the power light on the hinge briefly light a dim orange and then remain off. Something is waiting for power to be restored (aka the battery to reconnect) and then drawing juice from there but I haven't been able to figure out what.

 

So it turns out that i haven't fixed anything at all.

Basically the 99% charge level was a trick. I realised today that if you leave for 8 hours, start up on AC, then unplug AC, the battery level quickly drops to 93% which is what I was seeing before.

So all of this was a wasted effort

I'm going to try shutting down, removing the battery for 5 mins, and then reinserting the battery and leaving for 8 hours. Maybe that will force devices to be off (but probably not).

I'm starting to think that its probably a design flaw in the Z series and nothing to do with drivers.

Maybe to rule out a driver issue i could start up the laptop from a linux boot disc. This is more likely to force devices to off on shutdown than windows is...

Any other suggestions?

 

OK, Possibly found the solution.

The ONLY device to not be in the D3 power state when the computer is shutdown is the:
"Microsoft Streaming Quality Manager Proxy"

To show this device in the windows device manager, you need to show hidden devices.
It will then be under sound, video and game controllers.

You can't disable the device though. I could uninstall it (anyone is welcome to try!) but this might just result in it being re-installed again after a restart (but should be long enough to test if it is the cause of battery drain)

Anyone want to give it a go?

If anyone can find out what this actually does, i'd appreciate the info

 

interesting thing , hope someone can try it soon

 

It's not a hardware device, which means it's not running either way during any sleep/hibernate/off state. So it has no effect on battery drain.

 

Battery drain issue is a ssony oftware design related issue,
http://www.sony-asia.com/support/faq/240494
It seems that even the laptop is switched of, the cpu remain powered, as i noticed the high pitch sound from the botttom of my z when switched off.

Since the power switch is a software switch, it seems difficult to remove the drain issue. Even the ISBmgr running in background can explain this, this process analyse the battery to check if non genuine battery sony, so even powered of laptop keep cpu activity for power management.

So disapointed about this drain explanation, ll think twice before buy another vaio computer and may switch to other brand in the future

 

I thought that initially, but it as its a software device, it must be running for some piece of hardware. So perhaps it could be changing the power state of a device, or stopping one from going into the D3 state.

I don't know. Someone should try and delete it!

Hopefully in a week or so i'll get permission to delete it (gf won't let me ) after which if it doesn't fix it, i will upgrade to Windows 7 RTM and see if that helps.

But someone should try it before hand (create a restore point beforehand just incase)

 

I do wonder though, from my testings it appears that Sony really did make this power drain issue a "feature" not a "bug". Well as I have worked in the Software Development industry for awhile, a feature is usually just a well dressed bug!

I've done tests ranging from 7hrs to 14hrs and even 24hrs (just recently).
It appears that all tests seem to cap the drainage at around 80%, I have yet to turn off any features.

Either I am a very lucky man and keep hitting the 80% mark and never below, or that it simply caps it at 80%.

I'm gonna try a 48hr run to see how much it drains, I will report back!

A food for thought? Maybe they intentionally put in the drainage to prevent the battery from overloading and exploding like we have seen with other brand laptops (some are including Sony of course).

As with most software engineers.... its easier to create a workaround or a hack than to develop a total solution.

 

Looks like from approx 48hr test, it still sits at 80%. No more drops beyond that according to the tests ive done.

Done a 7hr -14hr - 24hr and even a 48hr all had mixed results between 80-83%.
From my tests, the conclusion i reach... is it appears to be a programmed thing, either intentional or unintentional. However its capped at 80% for me no matter how long i leave it off.

 

You are just lucky

 

well maybe it is intentional to stop batteries exploding

There was a solution a while back to set the battery care level to 100% and then it fixed the issue! maybe it does actually work (i was too scared to try it as some people were saying that maybe the drain was caused by using battery care! or something...)

 

Just to let you know about my own experiences regarding this issue:

I bought last March a VAIO Z31WN which they sell in continental Europe for a lot of money as a high spec business model and experience exactly the same problem.

All attempts fixing this issue failed. Sony support was unable to help by email or phone and sending the notebook in did not help either: the problem persists and obviously can't be solved. My best guess is that this is a hardware issue and can't be solved by updating firmware or changing configurations. At least with my model I can assure people that the problem is not the battery itself which once removed from the notebook has no noticeable drainage problem within 24 hours. One has to be careful to boot the machine from the power adapter and reinstall the battery after the machine is booted up, otherwise energy consumed during booting up will show as loss of capacity. These steps are recommended by the German Sony Vaio hotline to check the battery itself.

Having occasionally read that the drainage stops somewhere: that's most likely an illusion since people do not wait long enough. After two weeks in a cupboard the before mentioned model drained the battery to 0% i.e. the notebook can't boot up any more without connecting to an external power supply.

What does it mean: Any claims about battery life are misleading unless you make sure that you either remove the battery when you are not working or you recharge just before you start the test. It also effects the lifetime of the battery itself which is given as a fixed number of load cycles. In addition it also means that Sony did not implement the ACPI specifications correctly since they have a specification of a power down mode which is equivalent to physically interrupting the power supply. Let alone that Sony's behavior of sweeping the issue under the carpet is ridiculous when at the same time the European Union has just completely banned conventional light bulbs at 100 Watts and above in favor of energy saving bulbs and the whole world attempts saving energy in order to moderate effects of global warming. I thus wonder why any authority allows Sony sell such crap! We need regulations which enforce that battery powered electronic goods are able to turn off into modes which consume no energy at all.

Their claims that this is normal behavior are nothing but a recommendation of buying from other vendors. As long as Sony can't tell people which important notebook features require the battery to drain at that rate, and given that it certainly does not happen with models of other vendors which I am currently using (Dell, Flybook, HP, you name it!) the problem is a bug and not a feature and they should be doing something about it! I am almost convinced that the battery drainage is not a VAIO Z series problem. It is a Sony Vaio problem since it has also been reported for models of other lines like the SZ, TZ and the P series. Maybe the thread should thus be renamed as official SONY VAIO battery drainage thread or the art of ruining an entire business line, since my first Vaio is definitely my last one too. I can only hope that this issue gets further disseminated and taken up by those guys who actually write all these nice notebook reviews and tests to make potential buyers aware of potential problems and let their readers make educated decisions about which models they really want buy.

 

I cannot agree with you more nemo65. Like I have mentioned before, my Mum's budget Asus laptop dropped only 2% after it was left unused for 4 full weeks! The battery was still in the laptop.

 

I have pinpointed the high-pitch sound on my Z, but having lost the service manual for it, I will need someone else to confirm this for me (can't download another service manual because my net has been ridiculously slowed down...).

I think it may be the bluetooth module (if I remember correctly). The sound is coming from right below the EJECT shortcut key on the keyboard.

I have a Samsung R45, a 3kg 1.6GHz Celeron monster with 512MB RAM and 256MB ATI 200M graphics. It is over 3 years old now, and having not used it ever since getting my Z (back in Christmas last year) and seeing that the battery is still connected on it ever since then, I thought I should try starting the R45 up and seeing what the battery status is like. It runs XP Home, and when it booted up, it had 99% remaining. That is 10 months of inactivity, and 99% remaining on battery - my R45 lasts an hour and a half on average from a full charge on battery saving mode, so the battery is not in new condition as it is....

I really, REALLY don't believe that Sony added the battery drain as a 'feature'; sounds more like they are trying to sweet-talk their way out of a firmware fix (which they probably think, and maybe it will be, costly)

Ah yes, Sony also seems to have released an update for the Settings Utility on Vaio Update. Haven't tried updating (darn slow internet), and when I try clicking on the software to find out more about it, the Sony error page shows up. The update is 'Setting Utility Series Upgrade Ver 4.3.4.09130'. My Z is a 2nd gen version. Maybe (though I rather doubt it) this will solve the battery drain AND will be an official VT update????

 

Quite a lot of things in history are simply from a "bug" but they simply redressed it as a Feature. LOL XD Bugs quickly turn into Features in the software engineering industry, you go ask any programmer how many bugs they made look like features.... I'm sure every one of them will say they have done it sometime in their lives.

BTW Sony isn't the only company which produces laptops with this not so well dressed bug. Some of Lenovo's laptops also have this problem.

Maybe if we really want to get this fixed, we should petition it, and then..... co-ordinate a giant Notebook Review Forum bombardment of email at Sony? LOL >.> 102193821039 emails at midnight!..... haha

Then again, you have to remember no laptop is perfect, there are some laptops which have more problems and worse problems.


BTW I have noticed VT and new Bios is available for the following models:
VGN-Z46MD, VGN-Z45GD, VGN-Z35TN, VGN-Z36MD, VGN-Z47GD, VGN-Z46TD, VGN-Z45TD, VGN-Z36SD, VGN-Z48TD, VGN-Z46SD, VGN-Z46GD, VGN-Z48GD, VGN-Z36GD, VGN-Z36TD, VGN-Z37GD

 

Would you happen to know whether any of the mentioned Z once ran firmware version R2168M3?

My 2nd gen Z is currently running that, and if any of the Z you mentioned used to run on R2168M3, then that means that I will be able to OFFICIALLY update to get VT...
Also, any idea where I would be able to get this new firmware?

Cheers in advance.

Also, I tried downloading 'Setting Utility Series Upgrade Ver 4.3.4.09130' and keep getting an abnormality error. When I try and install it manually (it is saved in C:/Update), it says it can't find a previous version of 'Setting Utility'. When I try clicking on the file name on VAIO UPDATE, it comes up with an error page... Hmm... Anyone else with this issue...???

BTW - I am more than keen on spamming Sony till they have no choice but to respond and fix the battery issue (which is the only problem that I, and I am sure many other Z owners, face with the Z) - anyone else keen for mass action...???

 

I agree that one should send out a clear message. Organizing a petition to Sony for some fix in firmware/bios. I have checked with the linux kernel community and they said that lenovo had a similar problem and it was fixed by a bios update afair.

 

Ok - I am quite keen on organizing this mass request... Though would like to get a basic idea on how many people are willing to participate...?

Also, on P48 on this posting; can anyone tell me if any of the Z3 series used the R2168M3 firmware (or any other Z series for that matter), and whether they could tell me where to get the official VT firmware update from for that particular Z?

 

Quite obvious where to get it from, the official Sony website.
Anyways, yes you can get VT, here is the link for it:
http://www.sony-asia.com/support/download/347483/product/vgn-z26gn

This link is for the following models:
VGN-Z27TN, VGN-Z17GN, VGN-Z12GN, VGN-Z27GN, VGN-Z16GN, VGN-Z12MN, VGN-Z26TN, VGN-Z26SN, VGN-Z16SN, VGN-Z26GN, VGN-Z25TN, VGN-Z15TN, VGN-Z16TN, VGN-Z26MN, VGN-Z13GN

BTW, Maybe the new bios fixes the problem? don't really know.

 

YIKES~~!!
I only checked VAIO UPDATE so never bothered checking the actual site!

Thanks a million for this; now I can go clean install Windows 7 Pro RTM and use Windows XP mode ^_^

I rather doubt that Sony will try fixing the battery issue, unless we undertake a mass email request against their support centre(s) around the world. I have sent an email regarding that once, but as many others, been given the 'feature' response...

 

Far too long Sony has kept us in the air; but I think that not having upgraded the BIOS could mean that a solution will not be forthcoming soon. Anyway Sony should be ashamed to sell a rather expensive notebook that without doubt does its job satisfacorily, but better could have been sold without battery!

 

I would love to join the mass email though I only have a FW series notebook. This battery drain is very irritating.

 

Me too would like to join a petition or mass mail to obtain reaction from Sony from selling such expensive laptop (advertising on the battery life) incapable of overnight battery...
Same issue on my japanese Z71

 

Seems like a few are actually interested. Good to know.
Ok - from what I understand, Sony Customer services around the world don't operate in the weekends. What about we start by sending out fix requests during this coming weekend to one specific country service centre??? And when the reps come to work on the following Monday... BOOM~~ Huge load of emails requesting the fix...

Though I ain't too sure how Sony will react if their systems fail or something... But I think we Z users (and other Vaio users for that matter) deserve this fix - the premiums we pay for these more than justify this!!!

I don't think it will be too effective sending it to our individual country's service centre - for example I live in New Zealand, and heavenly_wild (he is around here somewhere...) is the only New Zealand person who has shown even an interest on the Z...

Just curious as to which country in the world has a large Sony Vaio customer base...? I was thinking the UK or the states, but better we discuss this before starting....
I don't think it will be useful sending the emails to Japan (not too sure if VAIO Japan service reps read English, but then, I know Samsung Korea reps do...).

 

We would need to plan it a lot, someone would probably have to go through this thread and PM/email everyone who has been involved as they probably don't pay attention anymore.

Possibly get everyone to sign an online petition first, then get everyone to send links to the online petition to all customer service centres in all countries.

It's likely they won't go "oh look, this person emailed all services centres". More likely they will just count all the replies up and think more people have a problem

Someone start an online petition?

 

Unfortunately, I am an university student - can only do so much......
Don't really have the money to setup a webpage for a petition site... And no, I ain't asking for donations; won't have the time to sort out a server anyways (shakes fists at tests)... Though maybe someone with a bit more time on their hands is willing to take this task on for the good of the entire VAIO community?

I think that if we all concentrate complaining and requesting just one country's Vaio service centre (a country that has a large Vaio customer base), maybe they will hear us through?

 

Honestly folks, I think your are wasting your time and energy by emailing the service centers. All you are going to do is fill some fourth tier support person's inbox and most likely these requests will disappear on their way up the chain of command. I think a much better approach is to aim much higher in your initial attempt. I would suggest you try to find an email address & snail mail address for a Sony executive much higher up in the customer support food chain. Then approach them with a letter writing and an email campaign asking first for an explanation of the cause of the problem and asking for a fix. And the key to this is the tone of the campaign. I know all of you are angry about this, but threats will fall on deaf ears. You'll catch a lot more flies with honey.

Gary

 

Nah. In no way am I saying that I am (and I know many others here) angry regarding this. More like disappointed. The Z is an excellent lappie, just the fact that something sold as a mobile device and draining itself of battery when not in use is not right. And it is not like it is unusable at all - just its mobility time is decreased; performance-wise it is perfect (and better ^_^)

We paid large premiums for the Z (and other vaios). It is only right that we get what we paid for. That is, proper follow-up support

And I tell you now; it ain't easy getting to some upper-ups (in Sony Japan even). Have a family friend who works for Sony Japan products testing division (some chipset and chemical design for Sony, which I am sure is optics reader and media design), and I would have to say he is free once every 4 months or so (for about an hour while at it...).

And you are right - politeness will work wonders - nothing good comes from agression. A mass asking a service centre to resolve the issue I don't think is agression. Rather, a more 'forceful' request. I would like to ask those who are willing to join this campaign (if it actually does catch alot of people's attention) to ask politely (that is, no bad mouthing, no threats to family etc etc...)

Aiming at one support centre; I know that support requests are often futile, but having a mass asking may yeild better results. So why don't we just TRY this out and see what happens. I mean, look what happened to VT - customers asked and they got (ok, the new windows 7 rather demands this feature, but then mobile people like meself also demand the maximum from the battery)

I will try and ask me sources for some upper ups for their emails, and will email them accordingly (won't be posting here, for obvious reasons). But the chances of me being redirected back to the usual customer service department is rather high.

EDIT
I will commit to this battery fix request somewhere in early November - currently need to finish up this year's university. I will probably setup a new thread and ask EVERY vaio user to register their interests in the fix there. And we shall go from there, I guess...

 

As some people have already noticed, I have setup a battery drain issue fix request thread in these forums.

I will be attempting to send that forum (the entire thing, AND its URL) to a high-up Sony man who is located in Korea. I cannot be 100% sure whether he will take this seriously, or whether he will simply refer me onto the usual customer service rep, but this is the only option I can think of. Other suggestions are welcome~~

And please, for all those who care about (and have been affected by) the battery drain, please leave a reply in that thread!

Thanks

 

I'm a Lenovo ThinPad X61s owner. The battery drain issue has affected all of us ThinkPad owners for around 2 years. Many of us ThinkPad owners had complained to Lenovo. However, like Sony, Lenovo was reluctant to resolve the issue.

Fortunately, a couple of months ago, Microsoft has quietly released a patch to correct the battery drain issue. I suggest you should also complain to Microsoft which is the source of the problem.

You all have my sympathy!

 

So what was the patch they released? What did it do?

Gary

 

It fiexed the HD Audio battery drain issue with Lenovo laptops.
It has been discussed in lenght in this thread.

DO

 

I never would have guessed that!

That was not my question, the question was what did the patch actually change? Did it update the power state tables for the driver? Did it update the BIOS? I am thinking if we knew the particulars, some enterprising soul might be able to try to duplicate the fix on a VAIO.

Gary

 

yeah i'm interested in exactly what it did.

Some people did mention that the battery drain was fixed by using the realtek HD audio driver from the realtek website. Though others said this did nothing to fix it, and you would think disabling would also fix it if that was the problem (but it did nothing).

If it is a Microsoft thing, you would also expect it to be fixed with Windows 7 (someone said previously that the issue still existed under the RC). I'd try the RTM, but the IEEE MSDNAA took down the windows 7 RTM licences because too many people were accessing the Windows 7 for $30 offer when the weren't eligible

 

I managed to get Windows 7 Pro through university... Tried RC on my Z a few months back, and yeah, battery drain remains.

If I remember correctly, there was a user here with nick 'Podam' (who owns the Z) who tried that HDAudio driver fix. It didn't work. I did try going to the hotfix site a while back, and it did mention that fix changed the HDAudio driver power status on the mobo (I think it was initially a S3 state, changing to a S1 state, can't remember now). It worked on some Toshiba, and Lenovo users, but so far not on Z users here.

I do know however, is that that MS Hotfix link is in this thread somewhere...