The official VAIO Z battery drain thread

Thank you so much! I'm psyched to have my BIOS back. Now I just have to figure out what is causing this drain. I have run command line queries in Vista to verify nothing is set to have wake enabled. Nothing in the new BIOS setting has wake enabled either. Battery care is disabled. I turned off the sleep state capability in the BIOS because I never use it anyway, so maybe that's the culprit.

 

Still seems to be a problem, lost 12% after 24hrs of being off. I really thought it might be BIOS related but at this point the only thing I can think of is bad hardware. Everything BIOS and software related seems to have been accounted for.

Arth, you stated you do not have drain but only use windows for specific occasions and never shut down from it for extended periods of time. Would you mind doing myself and the community a bit of service and trying an experiment where you shut down from windows and leave it for about a day and see if you experience drain too?

 

I have had a TZ for a while without any battery drain for a few month -until I turned on battery care. I didn't notice it happen for a while, so I cant be 100% sure its battery care. However, it does seem to do something, maybe set some hardware to on. I'm in the process of toggling battery care on and off and see what the result is. But I suspect i might be permanent...

 

Outside the notebook the battery of a series Z lasts very long, about 2% loss of charge in one week, which is normal. This from own experience. Because of the alarming battery problems Sony have met during last year and before, they try to take a lot of care for their batteries, resulting in surveying the battery even when the notebook is totally switched off. This means that your battery will drain within the notebook if your choice in the energy menu is battery care on. The 80% limit with battery care also is a precaution for overheating etc. Maybe this could lead to a longer battery life, but the disadvantages of a quicker drain etc could be more irritating than the gain in batterylife.
The choice is up to you!

 

Sony Must Do Something About This!!!

 

Just got my SR490 CTO this week. During initial setup, I saw a part about battery setup. I skipped that option since I have read about this issue on the forums and some feel "Battery Care" may be the culprit. Yesterday I shut down my SR and unplugged it for about ~15 hrs. I then plugged it in and immediately started it up and checked the battery status and it still showed %100. I realize this is not much help but thought I would throw it out there for whatever it's worth.

 

try to start it up when it unplugged and tell us the result

 

What Battery Care setting did you use?

 

OK, I tried starting it up after 45 minutes of being unplugged and a theoretical 100% charge. After startup and not plugged in I am at 93% already. I'll grant you that seems a little excessive but that was a cold start from a non-hibernation state. This is not representative of what my understanding of the problem is.

 

I guess that was part of my point. I have not changed any settings on Battery Care yet. At least as far as I know, it is still however it was out of the box.

Edit: Found Battery Care function. Right now it is turned off.

 

My battery care is disabled as well. Unless there is a bug with turning it off because it was once on, I still see drain. Try shutting down and recording the battery % and leave it for as long as you can. The cold start should use some amount of juice, but my experience has shown not more than 2%.

 

Found a new update on my Z71JB about the wifi drivers, take lot of time and quite extensive driver and wifi management update but tested right after the battery drain and still the same...
For information, on my Z bought in april in Japan and with battery care disabled now, charged to 100% yesterday and found 87% this morning...2 days ago it gave me 94% with same setting... sony need to clarifiy the strategy in battery management.

 

Sony knows about the problem, a Sony desk employee told me some days ago. So I asked if a solution was in the pipeline. He told that momentarily they did work on it.
Sometimes I think that if cars were produced with comparable problems (for example leaking fuel or a sudden death of the car battery) they would solve the problem within a couple of weeks. But apparently wiith notebooks and/or software the buyer is kind of a guinea pig they can experiment with.

 

Anyone using EXTENDED BATTERY.?

I wonder how long the juice lasts >>

 

Do you mean the "bigger" battery? I have such a battery. I can reach 7h and more with Wlan or WWAN activited in Stamina with some Office Task (brightness to 50%).

As far as I can tell I have not seen a drain problem with my Z.

 

Yes the big one >> Do your use Vaio BatterY Care or not

 

It was turned of by default but once I tried it and it was set to 80%. But some hours later I turned it off again because I am using the battery very often and I want the full capacity.

Question: Is it possible to configure that the battery only will charged when the level drops below a certain value?

 

Left it off over night. Booted in the morning without being plugged in. By the time the system was fully running, my battery showed 93%.

 

Yesterday I send my Z to standby while the battery was at 85%. 12h later when I turned it on again the battery level was at 80%. So it dropped by 5 percent with the extended battery being 12h in standby.

I think this should be ok?

 

Base, the issue is not with standby as standby should draw some amount of power to keep the state in RAM.

The issue is with completely shutting down the laptop and leaving it for a day or two. This normally sees 1% drop at most in other laptops but the sony loses anywhere from 8% to 14% during that time (when no components should be drawing power).

 

Ok - I will try it this night with the following scenario:

Shutting the Z down while running on battery and booting it up the next morning from battery.

 

yes do it , and you will notice drop for 10-20% ( damn sony)

 

Why do we need to spend time and effort on tons of thread like this while Sony-the one who should be responsible for fixing this just seat there? We should be bashing Sony hard about this serious problem instead of doing the things that's not a pleasure for customers

 

Yeah youre absolutly right.

I tested my lapotpop this night and I have a drain while the Z is shutted down by 5% in 7hours with the extended battery.

 

I have read and posted on that website as well. I noticed that if I unplugged my Vaio's AC adapter before putting the notebook in hibernation, there is no resulting battery discharge.

I have tried restoring my Vaio to almost the factory original condition to no avail -- still experiencing the battery drain when hibernating with the AC adapter plugged in.

Any one got to stop the drain with the AC adapter still plugged in prior to setting the computer to hibernation?

Thanks.

 

Look at what I've found on the net:

So probably it can give us a clue: maybe the actual problem is not that some device stays consuming energy while the unit itself seems to be powered off to us, but that battery just becomes terribly worn-out because of that strange charging scheme, so the drain is just an obvious consequence of a bad battery state?

 

There is a BUG

 

It looks nicer than the bug we are talking about in this thread...

 

OK, so i disabled the High Definition Audio sound controller in the Device Manager, turned off my Vaio for 12 hours, and voila! I had 100% battery still! Some other people should give this a shot just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and I will try this same test again to make sure it wasn't just magically fixed for that one time. I'll report back after my next test. If this really does work, I think I know where to find a Windows Hotfix to fix this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970030

 

Good work man! Keep us posted on your second test!!! I am sure everyone is eager to find out

 

Was the charger cable unplugged?

 

Yes. I only plugged it back in when i was turning it on. And my second test was shorter but it still yielded the same results, so i think i that must've been the issue. And I tried the hotfix i posted a link for, but it didn't work for some reason so at this point, I've just disabled my High Definition Audio.
I'd still like to hear back from someone else who tries this "fix".

 

Did you use "shut down" or "hibernate"?
The two are not identical -- even though many think of hibernate as "turned off", it really isn't -- it powers off the HD, CPU and fans, but leaves power to a lot of different subsystems that can wake the machine up. In this case, the bug is that HD audio was left powered on regardless of whether "allow this device to wake the machine" was enabled or not. But this will only affect hibernation -- not a shutdown.
So it may not help those who experience a power drain when the machine was shut down and not hibernating to disk.

(I've never experienced the problem myself, but then again, I don't use hibernate either.)

 

This is interesting! Does disabling HD audio result in the inability to listen to audio from the laptop?

 

I can attest to the fact that it does disable the sound to both the headphones and the speakers. The Microsoft Hotfix article talks about disabling the "Wake on Ring" function of the driver by clicking the Power Management tab in the device properties menu but, mine does not have a Power Management tab. The other thing I notice is that the HD device is listed twice. I wonder if one of them is the HD audio for the HDMI port. If so, it might make sense that if the HDMI audio is disabled, it might make a difference without disabling the rest of the PC'c audio.

 

hi i just try your method ...disabled HD audio controllers in device manager...turned the computer back on after hibernation...lost 4%
i dont know if i miss anything ...

 

Yes, one of them is for the HDMI port. I think the HDMI port has ATI somewhere in it; the HD audio is the Realtek one. Well, I guess I don't find this problem annoying enough to necessitate disabling my sound, so I'll leave it running for now.

 

Since one of the features of HDMI 1.3 is remote wake-up, it makes sense that it's enabled by default.

 

I'm not entirely sure about hibernation. I'm talking about a full SHUT DOWN. To make it clear. SHUT DOWN. NOT HIBERNATION. Umm. 4% could be normal for a reboot from battery. I don't know about hibernation, but from a cold, total reboot, 4% could be about okay. Try leaving it off for an extended period of time like say 8-12 hours or so. Then see what the drop was in battery life. If it was still about 4% then that's fine.

Yes, it does completely disable all audio, but since i rarely use my laptop for audio, it's okay with me. Plus all I have to do is reenable it from the Device Manager and it's totally fine. There are two audio things listed in the Device Manager, and yes one is HDMI and one is the HD Audio Driver. In my case, I'm pretty sure the problem is with the HD Audio Driver and not the HDMI Driver. I will double check this though.

 

disabled the hd audio under device manager, i only have 1 anyway, complete shutdown for 18h, lost 13% from an extended battery. Also this is under w7 rtm - the hd audio patch mentioned may have been vista only (no mention of w7).

 

I'm running Vista right now. My "fix" worked under both SP1 and SP2. The patch or hotfix i posted doesn't work for me, i just posted it as a potential solution. Hoping maybe it worked for someone.

 

If it really works, I think you can automate this process by using EventGhost and DevCon ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272). On a suspend event, or hibernate event, you can disable the HD audio drive, and on a resume event, you can reenable it.

 

Same here. I did a clean install, tried to apply the hotfix right after and still experienced the drain. I still encountered the drain when disabling the High Definition Audio Controller prior to placing the computer in hibernation.

I then went to Sony support to download a few driver updates including the Vaio Care Software Update (August 17, 2009 release) -- not sure what it was but downloaded it anyway, Setting Utilities Series Update 4.1.01.09230 and 4.3.1.04240, and the Intel Wireless Network Adapter Driver Update and still experienced the drain.

I have updated the OS (Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit) to SP2 and so far it looks promising. Putting the computer in hibernation while the AC adapter was unplugged this morning kept the battery charge at 50% (my battery care max charge setting) after 10 hours in hibernation.

I will report back tomorrow as I have put my Vaio in hibernation, this time with the AC adapter attached. I'm crossing my fingers that the drain issue will have been laid to rest because of all these Microsoft hotfixes/updates.

Good luck to us Vaio owners.

 

Have you tried to install the latest RealTek HD Audio Driver? I have done it but wasnt able to test the battery drain so far.

The driver is available at: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/
Maybe someone else is faster then me.

 

This hot fix didn't work for me and sure for others too. So, make this quick here. Can anyone in the US give me their ZIP code or address so that I can send Sony an e-mail to have a serious look at this? Or if its more convenient, I can paste the content here and then some can send this for me?

Thanks!

 

Damn it. After installing SP2, the drain goes on even with the AC adapter unplugged prior to hibernation.

 

I did install R2.30 drivers, but there was a problem with the driver in Win7, resulting in some sort of crackling noise. So I reverted to older drivers. A few other Win7 users had a similar problem. Waiting for R2.31

 

I too have disabled the audio device on my Z to no avail. I still see drain on shutdown. I see a lot of people discussing hibernate on their Z, but I only have the Sleep state available to me, not Hibernate. Did you have to do something to enable the Hibernate functionality?

 

I installed the new HD Audio driver from the Realtek Website on my Vaio Z (Win Vista) and I can say that there is no battery drain anymore. YEAH!!!

After installing the new driver I switched my Vaio Z completely off and disconnected the power cable for about 15 hours. The result: 80% of battery power with the standard battery care function. NO DRAIN!

Finally I can now enjoy my awesome new notebook without having to bother with this stupid battery drain.

Nevertheless, I think that it is "strange" that this problem could not be solved by the Sony Support Service. In the end it was just a driver problem.

Thank you for your support here in this thread.

Cheers,

Andre

 

Once you actually turn on your notebook after the "break" does it happen that a certain amount of battery power is drained quickly (like droppingg by 15% points in just some minutes)?