VGN-SZ330P/B Express Upgrade to Vista Halved my Extended Battery Life

Hello Everyone,

It's my first post here and I'm in need of some help in a big way. I apoligize in advance if it's lengthy.

I got my Sony VGN-SZ330P/B in late December 06 with the plan being to get the Express Upgrade to Vista Business and it would be my new primary laptop. I bought the rather expenseive extended life battery and got a lifespan of just over 4 hours on the Sony Windows XP disk load.

Also, I'm in IT and at work one of my projects is to develop our company Windows Vista deployment. I've done a lot of work with Vista on IBM ThinkPads and IBM desktops. My experience over 20 or so laptop migrations is that typical battery life doesn't change much if any going to Vista from XP.

Along comes the Express Upgrade to Vista DVD from Sony last Friday night. I stay up late doing the upgrade...which was no small piece of work with many many reboots.

At the end, a couple of things didn't work like the camera and there were wierd TPM errors.

My battery life on the VAIO Maximum Batery Plan was now 2.0 hours!

Does anyone know how to get my battery life back to what it should be? I called Sony and they admitted there were some issues with drivers in the Express Upgrade DVD and that everyone that got it would get a "companion disk" soon. Camera and TPM issues were part of the problem but no known power issues.

I checked the Sony site and there wasn't much in the way of newer drivers than are on the Expess Upgrade DVD.

I did stop using the Sony power management plan and switched to the Microsoft Power Saver plan and get it up to 3 hours...still a long way from the 4 hours I had until Friday night's upgrade.

Does anyone know a solution to this?

Thanks in advance,

Dwight

 

I am wondering if you actually get 2 hours or if the software incorrectly reads it has having 2 hours of life left, even if its the second one, thats not good. I only hear mostly of bad stories involving Sonys at least and Vista.

 

Switch back to XP if you need longer battery run times.

>My experience over 20 or so laptop migrations is that typical battery life doesn't change much if any going to Vista from XP.

Not true with Sony due to the individual driver issues (Lack of working drivers mainly).

 

This is false...I have the same exact model the SZ330P/B and with the same settings I get at MOST 10-15mins less battery time in Vista than in XP which is fine to me for the added features, performance, etc.

With Intel (Stamina) I get around 4hrs in Vista. Used to be 4hrs 15mins or so in XP.
With Nvidia (Speed). I get around 3hrs in Vista. Used to be 3hrs 15mins or so in XP.

It all depends on your power settings like screen brightness and whatnot. Also when doing these tests actually time on a stopwatch or clock the amount of time you're running the battery...

I've seen plenty of times when the battery will report 2:30mins remaining but will say that for 15 mins before saying 2:29mins..this happens a few times so in essence your battery life is greater than whatever numbers you see.

 

Yeah, one thing I've noticed with the SZ460 is that the battery life estimate seems to take a while to be accurate, but once it is, it seems to get amazing battery life with the extended battery. I've been able to push it well over 5 hours easily, and the battery life is still really pretty solid even with wifi on and the screen brightness set to high.

 

30% reduction in battery life here with a sz330pb. Try going through all your power settings in Vista and also run in stamina mode.

Other things to try that are not guaranteed:
Turn off glass.
Get a fast 2 gig memory stick and plug it in.
Some around here have reported problems with the Smart-Wi utility.

This will definitely help:
Make sure you boot your machine while plugged in and let it sit until the disk stops thrashing before hibernating it and going mobile.

After a whirl with Vista, my view is to not bother with it until SP1, or even until software vendors start to treat XP like it is on life support. By that time the major software compatibility issues will be solved. Right now Adobe CS2 (including Photoshop) either does not run or is problematic. The widely used remote classroom application Blackboard does not run, because it will not work with IE7. Its just too much to bother with. I also find changes in the interface to be frustrating. What happened to the edit function in Explorer. I use invert selection all the time. Is that hidden somewhere? The extra large fonts of XP are much more legible on the small SZ screen than 120 dpi fonts in Vista. Anything larger than 120 DPI and the other objects get too big.

I am not real optimistic about drivers. To this day it is not possible to do a clean install of XP on an SZ simply by relying on the drivers available at esupport.sony.com. You have to get the sz3 packages from vaio-link and Frankenstein the thing together. I recall the US flash card reader worked for XP while the EU did not. Now its the Vista flash memory card reader and camera drivers that are AWOL at US Sony. True, you can get these things to work OK with the XP divers, but it does not bode well for me. I wonder where the stuff that goes out with express upgrades is being hidden.

 

Heh --- when my machine resumes from sleep, the battery meter will report that I have approximately 11-some hours of battery time left.

I haven't tried wearing my battery down from 100% -> 5% on Vista yet to get an accurate charge time but, according to the battery meter, I'm getting similar results to what I got in xp. I use the 'power saver' setting in Vista, and then went into the additional VAIO power management settings to turn off devices, just like I did in xp (LAN, DVD, Audio, etc). I've found that I have to manually adjust the screen brightness.

Like Mobilehavoc mentioned, the extra benefits to vista are definitely worth, to me, the added (if any) battery drain. YMMV.