The official VAIO Z battery drain thread

Hotfixes:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941600
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970030

Microsoft Support thread that helped Lenovo Users:
http://social.answers.microsoft.com...e/thread/790ed4c1-15fc-44a8-b429-e01af8f42767

There seem to be people previously in this thread who fixed the drain by disabling the HD Audio Controller (didn't work for me).
Some people say hibernating while on battery power only results in no drain.
Some people say installing the new Realtek Drivers from the Realtek website fixes the problem
Some people say they only experience drain on hibernation and it is fine on shutdown...(i wish )

Someone said Windows 7 RTM did nothing to help the problem.

Someone also said that the issue is Sony's charging method that constantly trickle charges batteries which cause them to die quickly or something.

I will try the hotfixes and new drivers as soon as i can, but can't at the moment as the laptop can't afford to be not working (if i screw something up) for the next few weeks.

Someone else try them and see what happens

 

See my chart on the drain problem:

http://questionit.nl/Battery_drain_checks_Sony_Vaio_Z_series.pdf

 

Your chart has one flaw that can be fixed in one of two ways. The chart does not take into account the acutal amount of charge used by each of the startup and shut down cylce. The hard way to fix it would be to rerun the test and recharge it to 80% after each test pont on the graph. (Yes I know that would take a very long time, which is why I said it would be the hard way.) The easy way would be to measure the amount of charge used to shut the machine down and power it back up again and subtract that amout from each of your test points. Just charge the machine to 80%, shut it down, start it back up and see what the amoutn of charge reads. The difference is the amount you need to subtract for each cycle in your test points.

Gary

 

O.K. ScuderiaConchiglia, scientifically and objectively seen you are absolutely right, but nevertheless this imperfect chart shows, for the relatively short time between begin and end of the measurements, the deplorable situation of our never ending battery drain problem.
And between us: I have not the intention to put any more time in observations of this kind, as, just like our battery drain, it is costing me too much negative energy, i.e. wasted energy.
I really hope someone of Sony will read this too.

 

It looks like, on average you were loosing 6% each time you tested. But if you were loosing, let's say, 4% just shutting down and rebooting. The actual loss is only 2%. I know, you are still loosing battery power. But one simple test cycle would allow you to then make a simple arithmetic correction to the entire chart. That way if Sony is reading this, they will at least see accurate data.

Gary

 

Did anyone of you contacted Sony about this issue and pointed them to this thread ?

 

Sony has already said the battery drain issue is by *design* and they have no intention of doing anything about it.

Go a few pages back and you'll find a link to a Sony page which states the above.

 

I only have a FW series notebook. The battery drains even when the notebook is shutdown (not hibernate).

Is this really a smart design? Why can't the battery drain 5% each week as oppose to 10-15%/day?

 

alanbrenton,

That is what we are wondering too!

 

Now that Sony released new drivers and a new bios: Did anyone check if this makes a difference on a Win7-Z setup?

 

For the FW user earlier (may or may not help the Z users). On my FW465J, I found some relief for excessive power consumption during hibernation after updating the Realtek audio driver to the most recent October 2009 versions for the ATI HDMI (v6.0.1.5945) and Realtek HD audio (v6.0.1.5953) from the Realtek site. I had already updated to the most recent BIOS and drivers from the Sony site but that alone didn't solve it. I still have about 15-20% (by the indicator) battery drain overnight hibernating, but earlier it would completely drain the battery over the same period. There's still something consuming power, but it's almost usable for me this way.

 

Thanks for the tip. I will see if they will work. Strange that I get batter drain too even during complete shutdowns.

I may actually upgrade to Windows 7 if it will resolve this issue.

 

Has anyone upgraded a FW or other Vaio series to Windows 7 and noticed a huge improvement over the battery drain problem?

There doesn't to be a lot of driver updates required for Windows 7.

Many thanks in advance.

 

So I've upgraded to Windows 7. After just doing a clean install and installing Kaspersky Internet Security 10, I still experienced a 22% (from 50 to 28%) battery drain overnight (8 or so hours) after putting the system in hibernation.

Maybe it really is a battery design to lose so much charge. I shutdown (28% remaining) the computer and will report if I experience battery drain as well when I get home tonight.

 

I have a hypothesis that explains why many users are experiencing larger-than-typical losses of battery power while in sleep mode, and these effects can be replicated by the user but have high variances among different users, and are seen across multiple laptop platforms (e.g. the similar problem with the Lenovo).

What if the problem is with the massive amounts of RAM some people are using with 64 bit operating systems? DRAM requires constant refresh current in sleep mode...in fact, besides the sleep LED (with a 5mA draw) and a miniscule amount of power used by the power monitoring circuitry (don't know, but would guess less than 1mA) refresh DRAM current should be the only thing drawn during sleep.

Well, that's proportional to the amount of RAM. Now with 64 bit OS's people are going from 2GB to 6GB and more, and so we'd expect to see a sudden 3x decrease in sleep-mode battery life. I wonder if some of the most vocal members of this thread are the ones with 8GB, which are depleting 4x faster than they are used to.

Perhaps it would be useful for people to start reporting how much RAM they have when they talk about sleep problems with the battery?

(Yes, I agree that this has nothing to do with the power loss during hibernation that people are finding. It is inexcusable to have a 400mW power draw during hiberation...I can only guess that for some reason the laptop after saving its hibernation file and turning off its power light isn't actually entering into hibernation but staying in sleep mode - a massive firmware problem).

 

even without hibernation but turning off normally and from linux there is the drain. I asked on the linux kernel mailing list, the answer was something like "there was a similar problem with asus notebooks, they fixed it with a new bios, we can do nothing" ...

 

So by "turning off normally" you mean not sleep, not hiber, but pure "off". And there's still 0.4W of battery drain that's not present if you remove the battery. Jeez.

OK, my hypothesis is wrong. It's not DRAM drain, it's bad engineering. How sad on an otherwise excellently-engineered piece of equipment.

 

Could it relate to the BIOS telling something not to shut off?

I did a clean install of Windows 7 on my Vaio FW series and shut it down (not hibernate) this morning with 100% charge. After 11-12 hours, I have 96-97% remaining. I've already upgraded by BIOS to handle virtualization and I don't have battery care enabled yet.

 

I did a bare install of Win7 on my Z590 today. I booted to the desktop, did a couple automatic Win7 updates and that was it. I did not install a single driver or piece of software from Sony.

The battery drain persists for me in this state. I left it completely shutdown for 3 days and when i came back to it I was at 68% from a fully charged state. At this point I think it would take an electrical engineer inside an opened up chassis to tell us what is drawing power on this thing.

 

I certainly hope I ain't the only one - but just making sure...
Does anyone else here notice that the battery drain is not present after installing 7 and the new BIOS?

Been testing and keeping an eye out on the battery levels the past three days, and I am actually seeing NO battery drain whatsoever so far. The issues regarding excessive battery consumption during shut down and power up though still remain. Just wondering if anyone can confirm...?

I have installed the R2170M3 BIOS and clean installed all the official windows 7 drivers.

 

R4043M3, Win 7 64-bit, battery drain issue remain unchanged for me. About 12% battery charge loss per 24 hours.

 

Found this interresting post about a fix for drain.

http://www.mydigitallife.us/2009/08/sony-vaio-p-and-the-lid-switch-power-drain.html

Vaio P drained same amount (little more) when hibernating, a lid trick fixed the issue>

 

Thanks. I just set both battery and AC power to do nothing upon lid closing on my FW series. Will keep others posted.

 

Seems to me that this issue would most likely caused by the "Behavior when Opening the LCD Screen Lid" more so than the closing the lid. Seems like something must be running to detect when the lid opens.

 

I've set the lid to do nothing when openned and closed from the first day I got my Vaio Z, since I shutdown my Z each time I'm done using it. Why I shut down? Beacuse I use SSD, when I hibernate, it will write some 4GB worth of RAM data each time to the SSD and in turn will shorten the SSD's life faster.

I do use Sleep sometime when I'm just gonna be away for a little bit. But anyway, even when set them to do nothing when openned and closed, and the lappy is shut down, I still get 10%-12% battery charge loss per 24 hour.

 

After hibernation for about 24-28 hours, battery life went down from 51 to 30%.

 

I' m a potential Vaio Z buyer and very interested in this topic.

Has anybody tried a different approach and complained to Sony on Environmental/Green grounds?
It is clearly a waste of energy to have to keep the laptop plugged in when not in use. But from reading here it looks like the battery can go flat within a week if it's kept in the laptop and not connected to the supply.
I thought electronic devices were supposed to be reducing their 'standby' current when off to avoid this wasre of energy!


Secondly, in an earlier post I think somebody indicated that their battery drain seemed lower if the power supply was removed from the laptop before it was powered down.
Did anybody else confirm this?
If this is true it would suggest that the charger circuitry is still connected to the battery, but because the power-supply is disconnected it somehow discharges the battery instead.

 

no way... the fix didn t change anything on my Z, with lid action changed to nothing. Hibernation at 80% and after 6 hours dropped to 72% but the fix was supposed to be good way since i read on Sony website that the internal circuit manage the button action since there are software switch and require power from battery.
I will try to disable the action for lid and for power button to nothing.

Even the x series has battery drain??

 

This must be a hardware issue and not software. My VAIO Z drains as well, even when it is completely shutdown. Windows drivers cannot be involved as windows is not even running. I'm sure if you wipped the disk clean you would still have the same draining issue. No more Sony equipment for me! Frankly, virtually everything they make these days is flawed.

 

@podam
You asked, if the latest x series has got the same problem and I can tell you it is the same. I tried two notebooks of that series and both lost power by drainage.
And yes, from the support you get the same bull that it is quite normal to lose up to 15% of power in about a day.
Now I bought a used notebook from the TT series. Same problem, but not that extreme. I can live with it, but I think that it is a shame how Sony treats their customers. If only I had the power to make this public. I am really angry about their behaviour, treating us like idiots.

Friedrich

 

I have turned off the lid action setting in both the VAIO power management setup and the stock Windows Vista settings (They are separate and distinct so get them both) and after an overnight with the battery in completely shutdown, I still had full charge (would typically lose about 8%). I am going to do an extended test leaving it off for the next couple of days and I will report back.

 

Thanks for report, they have the same issue for entire line of their laptop... That s why i am confident we will find a workarround for this.
Since i upgraded to windows 7 on my Z, with all last drivers from sony essuport may look for further test especially the lid trick.

 

jtsarnak,
thanks for updates, look promising.
Since i upgrade to W7 with english drivers (instead of japanese before) i can check all the control settings for lid. Give a try on my z this weekend after work.

 

Hey Jtsarnak. Do you mind updating us with your drain experience after the complete shutdown and setting lid action to do nothing under both Windows and VAIO power management?

I have installed Windows 7 and am afraid that the drain is still a problem with the lid action set to do nothing under both Windows and Vaio power management. I changed the setting on both, hit apply, and then reverted back to the do nothing option. I'm giving it one more attempt after the battery's completely charged.

 

I've had the lid action to do nothing since I got my Vaio Z and after upgrading to Win 7. Still lost alot of charge. One time I didn't use the lappy for 3 days, it had some 65% battery when last shutdown the thing. Switching it on after that 3 days, I was greeted with blinking green power light and as I arrived to desktop, I checked my battery to only have 5% charge left. All this running on battery, didn't plug in the AC adaptor.

 

I don't know what I did, but I am NOT having battery drain issues with my Z now on Windows 7 x64. I have clean installed from x86 Vista.

I have tested it out a few times so far, but no drain whatsoever.
My test:
- Attach battery.
- Plug in AC brick
- Charge fully (no batterycare, but doesn't matter in my case)
- Startup windows and SHUT DOWN (no hibernating). This is to get Windows to acknowledge batt. is on and stuff
- Disconnect AC brick
- Wait a day or so without connecting to AC, without turning on, and without removing the battery.
- Plug into AC.

I wait about 10 minutes and the charge indicator doesn't turn on. I boot the Z and Windows says 100%.

Something to note, startup/boot alone (not too sure about shut down) eats about 5% with battery only.

But the thing is, I'm disliking 7 at the moment and considering going back to Vista... I wonder if it will stay like this once on Vista again...

 

I have a similar issue on my new Vaio FW51 but mine was also losing battery power when shut down - i have cured the losing power issue when shut down by disabling the lid switch as mentioned on this forum. Only had the laptop for 4 weeks but i noticed on sleep in Win 7 in only lasts 10 hours before being flat...seems rubbish as my 4 year old Mac will last a whole week and still have some juice left.

Rang support - what a joke they told me it is usual for a battery to lose that much what a crock....they are going to call back today and hopefully i will get a new battery as i am only getting 1:30 with just web surfing and an hour on Blu Ray play back.

Tempted to take it back but i want a laptop that plays blu ray and there aren't many choices that don't have the horrible shiny finish but very disappointed with Sony on Customer service so far.

 

I have had similar results to this on my SR490. I think the key here may be that if you repeat your test but without plugging in the brick again and letting it start up, you will see way more than a 5% drian that can be accounted for on startup. My other lappy - HP in sig. running Vista x64 will show 100% battery after starting up on battery. My theory is that Sony VAIOS don't accurately track the ammount of battery time that is actually left. There is another thread somewhere that talks about this issue but it doesn't get much discussion anymore.

 

Hmm...

Well. Ok. I shut down with AC (with battery attached). Then I detach the AC and leave the Z alone for a day or so. Then I reattach the AC and the charging lamp doesn't come on, which tells me the battery hasn't drained

I will agree with you. VAIOs don't seem to tell the battery levels very well. When I startup and lose about 5%, the remaining time will remain the same for about 30 minutes (sometimes increase by 2 hours on Stamina PERFORMANCE). My old Samsung SENS R45 (which runs XP) reports 99% battery when Windows is started up with battery only. I ain't too sure with the Z and XP (downgrade disc); I don't really plan on moving away from 7 at the moment (maybe to Vista)

 

If you have time, try shutting down the laptop and leave it completely off with battery attached for at least 3 days. Then switch it on running only on battery, so don't plug in the AC. I lost some 60% of battery charge after leaving it completely off (shut down) for 4 days. Win 7 x64 Ultimate.

Yeah, seems other branded laptops don't eat up so much battery charge from just starting up the lappy.

 

Ooo... That is like telling me to stop pissing for a week.

Ahaha...
I'll try that out. Though I can't make any guarantees since my Z is my main PC, but I'll shift some work over to my family computer, and will report back on Saturday, hopefully...

Anyway, some spec info on my Z
- P8600 C2D
- 1600x900 LED LCD
- Windows 7 x64 PRO (clean install)
- All drivers and and apps installed (VAIO Control Centre is fully populated)
- All drivers downloaded off Sony's ftp site (which I have forgotten)
- 'Wake up when lid open' is ON
- Batterycare is set at 80% (and yes, I know that feature is only designed to prevent battery wear and tear, not reduce battery drain); for the purposes of this test, I'll switch this off
- Hitachi 7K2 320GB HDD
- 3GB RAM

No battery drain is seen regardless of system being shut down with either STAMINA or SPEED modes. However, I always shut down AFTER I switch the hardware wireless switch to OFF. Have yet to try shutting down with that set to ON. During the next three days, I'll use the OFF position (as I normally would)

 

I just tried your switching wifi off prior to shutting down, just to see if the tiny buzzing noise under the laptop is still there..... and it still was. To me it's an indication that something is still sucking the battery.

Well, gonna try that method again but I'll let stay shut down for at least 2 days.

BTW, don't force yourself to test this lol, especially when your Z is practically your main machine.

 

Unfortunately my extended tests since turning off the lid action has shown continued drain on the battery. I thought I finally had this thing licked. It's a damn shame too because this laptop would truly be perfect for me if it wasn't for this drain.

 

Just keep on listening for that tiny buzzing noise under the lappy, if it's still there, then the battery drain still exists in my opinion.

 

Ok - DAY ONE
Haven't turned on the Z for 23 hours now. So far, I'm coping.

The high-pitched sound is there, and in my personal opinion I think it has grown gradually louder the past 6 months or so. Also, the sound comes from near the power on switch, which if I recall correctly is where the bluetooth module is located.

When I had my Vista installation (factory installed x86 Business), I would sometimes NOT experience battery drain, but the sound was still there beforehand.

Anyways, last night I charged my Z to 80% via batterycare (which I know doesn't stop drainage, but only increases the useful lifetime of the battery in the long-run.. Basically, I'm trying to emulate my personal working conditions), and I shut it down with the AC on and the batt. attached.

Then I took out the AC and left the Z as it is (battery is still attached).

If I were to turn it on now, I would personally not expect a battery drain (as the past few days has shown).

 

If you hear a sound at all, there is battey drain happening. What else could be powering the sound you hear???

Gary

 

Well, that is true.

Then I guess we can assume that the batt. on the Z is giving windows the wrong info. I remember a few weeks back (and a few more other times) where despite the sound, I connected the brick and started up windows; it reported 80% charge (me using batt.care), ie no drainage. That is about a 10 hour shut-down intervals. The Z in that case was left shut down with the NOT AC connected.

Anyways, I'm now entering DAY 2 of not using the Z. Sound is still there, though it is quieter (maybe because I woke up 20 minutes ago).

I'm curious. Does anyone use the hacked BIOS still? The one where people used to unofficially enable VT. Did anyone see anything like S1 or S3 power states when they had that flashed on the BIOS?

My personal theory is that might be whats causing something to not turn off. I'd like to check windows 7 myself, but for obvious reasons....

 

I was unable to go for any longer; I started up my Z on batt. after 48 hours of shut-down.

In a nutshell: Battery drain is present

It was started with the battery only. When I get into Windows, it says I have 65% left (remember I started from 80%). Assuming that the startup process consumes approximately 5%-10% battery when booting, and assuming it consumes 5% this time round, that tells me I got a battery drain of 10% in 48 hours.

Although I read some people here having much more loss in 24 hours (I read 30% in 24 hours somewhere around here); I guess I have it lucky.

A sidenote though - from 65%, it takes just 30 minutes to charge it back up to 80%, which is quite 'quick' in my books even if it is the upper-part of the charge. That leads me to believe that the information that the battery tells Windows is somewhat inaccurate. If it takes 30 minutes to charge upto 80%, I would (guess and) estimate it is starting the charging process from about 72%

 

No, no and another no, it cannot be that the boot process should consume about 5-10% battery power.

I know lots of notebooks and none needs that amount of power. In other words you lose about 15%.

 

I have a SR but same problem. Here's my latest observation:
Last night I installed BatteryMON and only charged to 81%...when I SHUT DOWN for the night, it was at 71%. This morning, upon Booting, it was down to 63%. I then plugged in the charger for about 15 mins then unplugged it to take it to another room and Bam, it's back to 71 %