Vaio CW Battery Drain Information

(I decided this needed a new thread)

Questions
What is Battery Drain?
-When your computer is turned off or in sleep mode and looses large amounts of battery life.

How do I know if I am affected?
-To my knowledge, ALL Vaio CW computers (at least with the i5 and 330m combo). I have come to to this conclusion because I have had two of these with the same issue and I have yet to see more than one person say they do not have it on a Vaio CW

How can I fix this?
-Right now there is no fix for loosing battery life while 'Shutdown'. As for sleep mode, you can help make the loss less substantial by doing a 'clean install'
Instructions here
And also make sure that you have these settings in the 'advanced power options'


Tests:
All tests have been run on two different VPCCW27FX notebooks

Test 1: 100% Battery, 4 hrs shutdown: 90%
Test 2: 65% Battery, no HDD, 3hrs shutdown: 48%
Test 3: 48% Battery, 'Power Saver' battery mode, 5.5 hrs shutdown: 20%
Test 4: Wifi Switch off
Test 5: 50% Battery, Battery out: 50%


Conclusions:
At the time being, there is no fix or known cause for the battery drain while shutdown. For now, myths of a clean install or using different windows battery settings make no difference, which means this is either a problem with the motherboard, BIOS or the battery it's self.




Please post any tests you have done your self. Also, if ANYONE is using a CW i5/i3 with no shutdown drain issues, please post or PM me. (please no "my friend has one and it works" because i'd need specific info from your laptop if you do not.



EDIT: I think I found the problem! Sony's battery care software works while the laptop is 'off'. Ex. You have battery care set to only charge up to 80%, even when the computer is off it will only go to 80%. The fact that this is still being managed means that the computer is partially still on when 'shutdown'. I will confirm this suspicion tonight I believe.

 

Actually aan310,

This isn't specifically a VAIO CW problem.

I have two SZs and a Z with me now and they ALL exhibit the same problem.

I don't really bother about sleep since we are aware that the computer is somehow still running so it could be a matter of a thousands things which could affect the battery.

But what pisses me off is when the darned computer is switched OFF. Those batteries drain until they are totally flat. This is crazy...

I am aware that many others in the forum have this issue too. When they pulled the battery out from the computer, the drain stopped.

But the draining shouldn't even be happening in the first place because the computer doesn't need the power. A hibernated computer is a computer which is totally shut off. [which is why we can remove the batteries, plug them in later and still resume from hibernation]

Stumps me and really cheeses me off.

 

Confirmed!
Pulling the battery makes battery life not diminish.
So, that means my suspicions are confirmed, it's most likely due to Sony Battery Care's low level function!

and whwtan, I know it's for many models but since i have experience with the CW, i'm going to keep it CW specific for now.

 

WE know it's a Battery care problem and all vaio's with Battery care function have this problem !! but the problem we can's disable it coz it seems it has some thing in the battery it self ?

 

It's how the program is in the BIOS, not the battery.
So, sony would have to release a BIOS without battery care (won't happen)

 

no way to turn it off?thats pathetic!

 

Battery care can be turned off. It's a setting in the battery circuitry, so that when you set battery care to on, it tells it to stop charging at 80%. So it's not the lappie staying awake. The battery just doesn't charge by itself because it has stored that command in its memory. You can set this in Vaio Control Centre; it can be turned off.

Battery care is in no way RELATED to battery draining. Battery care is a feature that helps minimize the DEGRADING effect that Li-Pol batteries, which lappies today use, ultimately all experience. That is, it extends the useful lifetime of the battery. If you need a chemistry lesson, listen up!

Li-Pol batteries experience degrading when they are charged and left near a full-charge mark (ie 100%, always plugged in). They also suffer degrading when almost / completely discharged (0%). The degrading results in the '10 minute battery life sydrome'; the usage time decreases with older batteries and laptops.
What Battery Care does is that it prevents the battery charging to the full 100% so that it doesn't suffer as much degrading as a 100% charged battery does. So Battery Care is NOT related to battery drain. It merely aims to reduce the degarding effects that a full-charged battery experiences, by making the battery stop charging at lower levels.

You may have noticed, but all gadgets with built-in batteries (cellphones are an example) all come with partially charged batteries, always near the 30% to 50% mark - discharged and fully charged batteries are bad for the Li-Pol cells. And the manufacturers tell you to charge new batteries overnight so that they go through an 'intro' charge of about 10 hours (even though it takes 3 to 'fully charge'), so that the battery begins its life with a proper full life. You should take this into account with everything today that runs on rechargable batteries.

Hopefully that clears something up.

Oh. There is an entire, 50+ page thread on the battery drain the older Z has been suffering. We did conclude that some hardware on the mobo didn't shut-down when it was supposed to (I personally confirmed the bluetooth module, but some other Z's are showing different pieces). Essentially, we need a BIOS update to get this fixed.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=299109&highlight=vaio+z+battery+drain

And my personal poll thread requesting Sony to fix this issue
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=423924

 

That explains a lot...

personally I don't really care as I rarely need to use the machine unplugged for more than 2 hours... I don't let it charge either I plug it when battery is low or when I know I'll need some battery life shortly..

of course a 8 hours battery could be nice, but its not the most important feature to me.

 

5ushiMonster, i understand where you are coming from, but the fact of the matter is that Battery Care indeed has a low-level counterpart (from the windows side software) that allows it to function while the laptop is powered off.
Sony has changed motherboards, bluetooth chips, etc in many different laptops since the old Vaio Z. What diddn't? Battery Care.

On the old Z it very well may be the bluetooth, but i cannot believe that since the old Vaio Z, that even laptops with different motherboards, bluetooth chips and BIOSes are being effected in the same way.
I'm telling you, it's the low-level Battery Care software.

 

So is there some way we can turn it off?

 

See attached.

 

That turns it off in windows, but the battery care application of the BIOS does not turn off with that. (unfortunately)

 

I've looked through a "BIOS" dump from my CW with a HEX editor and I didn't see anything about Battery Care in the BIOS itself. I saw things for other stuff thats not shown in the BIOS but they really aren't relevant to anything.

 

Has anyone thought about just disabling the Vaio Power management all together and using just the Win 7 power management?

I have my battery out right now since I mainly run off the PS. I was just curious if anyone could try experimenting with disabling the VAIO Power Management service so it doesn't startup and run.

BTW, in my Vaio Control Center, I don't even have that Battery Charge Functions tab. I think it is because my battery is out though.

 

Yea, that doesn't really fix anything unfortunatly.

 

sigh... any updates on this? I was looking to buy CW or F series...

 

Hmm, if disabling doesn't fix it. How about just uninstalling it completely and using the Windows power settings?

If that doesn't work, then I don't see this as being a Vaio Battery care issue especially if it is still there after disabling and uninstalling the program.

 

Well the windows application (i'm very certain) corresponds to SOMETHING low level in the system. Maybe i'm wrong...

 

I noticed after each clean install the battery drain got better. I've done a clean install on my cw about 4 or 5 times now. I did a clean install last night, downloaded drivers, checked for windows updates, completely shutdown laptop with 100% charge at 2:00am, and this morning I booted up and had 94% battery life. Not sure if this helps anyone but I figured I'd post it.

 

The command is stored in the battery memory? That could be the problem then. Since XGX2007 has said there doesn't seem to be any mention of Battery Care settings in the laptop BIOS, then it is very likely that the IC in the battery itself handles most of the functionality.

The 100%, 80% or 50% command stored in the IC of the battery needs to communicated to the embedded controller on the laptop. As, we assume, the laptop BIOS is not controlling the Battery Care, it is the battery itself that does the 'talking' and the BIOS, the 'listening'. This exchange of information is taking place even when shutdown as the EC needs to be told at what level to charge the battery at.

I think the reason why it's the battery itself that handles most of the Battery Care is because it allows a user to have many spare batteries and have a different charge setting for each battery eg. a user with two batteries may have a standard battery plugged in all the time, set at 50% but also have a spare extended battery, set at 80%.

 

that's really strange...

 

Does anyone use non-Sony batteries (on a recent model with Battery Care function)? Do you have battery drain with original Sony battery but very little or no noticeable drain with the non-Sony battery? If that's the case, then we'll know where the problem is most likely to be...

 

where do you get this non sony battery?

 

Where to get non-OEM batteries? I dunno about the availability for the CW series but for the Z series and many others, eBay, laptop battery specialists sell replacement batteries that are not Sony branded. The little test I mentioned in the above post assumes that the non-OEM battery doesn't have built-in Battery Care functionality.

 

I thought it was strange also! Not sure how this would've helped. How many clean installs have you done on your cw?

 

It seems like it has to be something in the bios somewhere. The bios controls the hardware and the hardware requires power to function so somehow the hardware isnt shutting completely off.

 

If anyone has a (relatively good) multimeter, one can probably measure how much current is being drawn from the battery. Then we can calculate and obtain some hopefully useful data.

I would be happy to do it but I don't have a Sony laptop anymore... any brave souls out there willing to open up a Sony battery? Maybe if we can have a look at the internals we can also figure out what makes a Sony able to determine a 3rd party battery from a genuine Sony battery.

 

Personally I think it may have something to do, at this point, with the way Sony makes the OS interface with the hardware. There seems to be an abstraction layer between the OS and the UEFI. Since Windows can't handle a full implementation of the EFI standard something is getting lost in the mix. It might have something to do with the Sony APCI control over the battery. This is my best hypothesis yet as to why this occurs. The Microsoft ACPI-CCMB component supports advanced configuration and power interface (ACPI) control method batteries. They include an ACPI Machine Language (AML) code control method interface between the battery and the host computer. Windows can manage batteries that have a smart battery subsystem interface, but it seems like Sony's software is controlling this. BUT... in order for the notebook to function correctly, the basic Sony drivers have to be installed. So what I'm going to do is see if I can pick the "Notebook Utilities" apart subsection by subsection and get rid of the "Sony power management", so I can still install the event manager and other things necessary for notebook control.

 

This is not hard to figure out. The "battery checker" software checks Sony/ non-Sony batteries. Don't install the program if you are going to use non-Sony battery.

 

Wow, getting pretty advanced here. The hard efforts are appreciated.

 

One on this HDD.


But (to both of you) i have run this laptop without a HDD and still experienced the drain issue (strange, right?) So maybe the UEFI hypothesis is a good one, because if there is a retained setting stored somewhere on the mainboard, this would mean it is HDD independent, BUT after multiple reinstall, the OS would be continually be sending different messages (*due to drivers being installed/not installed) causing a loss of the original memory thus causing battery drain to not be as severe. Does any one understand what i'm saying? (i ask because that scentance was kind of a circle)

 

I kinda do, but with each successive install is the end user properly calibrating the battery on each Windows installation? That's a concern. PC batteries expose information about battery capacity and health through the system firmware (or UEFI in this case). There is a detailed specification for the firmware interface (ACPI), but at the most basic level, the hardware platform and firmware provide a number of read-only fields that describe the battery and its status. The firmware provides information on the battery including manufacturer, serial number, design capacity and last full charge capacity. The last two pieces of information—design capacity and last full charge capacity—are the information Windows 7 uses to determine how much the battery has naturally degraded.

I'm still working on this guys... just give me a little time.

 

I looked over the Sony support forums (probably like the rest of you) and found the CW battery drain of around 10-15% per day is expected and "typical" operation. Do your experiences agree with this, or is it much more like the faster drain aan310 is expereincing?

I'm looking to replace an old Dell M60 with another near desktop replacement, and was about 10 minutes from pulling the trigger when I came across this drain problem. In your folks opinions, is this a killer problem?

 

IMHO, in my case no. But it does seem worse for others.

 

Theres an update for vaio power manager if noone's seen it

link

offtopic but does anyones vaio update work? mines apparently scanning but blank... aka not giving me any updates/notifications etc when i see them available on the website and when i try directly from like media galery it says 'vaio update cannot be accessed properly'.

 

That update looks pretty specifically tailored to a single issue they found, but here's to hoping.

Without playing some games with the battery terminals, I'm not so sure you can measure the powered-off current draw with just a multimeter. If you measure the voltage at the terminals, you might be able to notice a difference between the voltage at different levels of current consumption.

Outside the battery issues, has anyone else run into trouble with Sony laptops? I'm reading horror stories about their customer support, but am hard pressed to find the specs and price of the VPCCW27FX/B from best buy. Is it asking to much to have a laptop survive 3 or 4 years in the $900 price range?

 

apparently some one is having sony come out to fix their mobo for free, so their support can't be that bad if they are doing that.

But in the overall I am very happy with the sony, very well built etc, should last a long time.

 

Hi All,

I have a VPCCW26FG, and it was draining battery on sleep. Something like 68% to 45% in 2+ hours.

I tried only changing the power scheme settings as in first pic and its seems to have helped a lot.

Right now I am now on Balanced scheme, modified as described in first post. I also lowered max processor to 80% when on battery.
After one hour sleep test the battery kept at the same level of 23% as before.
Also note that battery care is disabled for me (out of the box).

Will do an overnight test with full charge.

regards

 

Hi, SuperLou,

One way of trying to measure current consumption in Sleep is to remove the battery completely, and to use a multimeter to measure the current which flows from the power supply to the system. Note that this won't be effective if the battery drain problem is "modal", in the sense that it doesn't occur while powered by AC, but it's likely not. If not, this would allow you to measure the current drain pretty precisely. Once my CW arrives in a few days, I may well give this a shot.

Cheers!
Mark

 

Hi Mark,

Even if you completely remove the battery, are you able to put something in series with the power supply?

 

Hi, SuperLou!

Sure! It's of course possible to cut the AC adapter's DC cord, but the much easier way is to get a pair of connectors (female and male), and to wire up a little extension cord which contains a tap for the multimeter. This'll do the trick!

Have Fun!
Mark

 

Hi, Folks!

I should point out that Sony's use of AC adapters which don't often match the battery voltage does introduce an error in computing power consumption via the DC port. What this means is that they use an internal step-down DC/DC converter that will introduce some degree of inefficiency due to losses in the additional DC/DC converter that don't apply to battery operation. Nonetheless, this will get us much closer to understanding how much power is actually being consumed in various modes during sleep.

Cheers!
Mark

 

Ok fellas. I reported a few days ago I was getting less battery drain after doing a few clean installs and have to report that my cw27 is experiencing very little battery drain, if any. I usually charge it completely at night, disconnect the ac, and in the morning after boot up I'll have 94% charge on the battery. I've done every clean install the same. followed the directions on the clean install thread, downloaded drivers, ran vaio care, reinstalled all drivers, smartwi and corel dvd. I hope this info helps you guys.

 

Well, i'll be looking into this more. Very interesting.

 

cw26fx/w here (same but with no blueray).

Sony Customer Support is basically someone or something sitting there to set up a repair service if you need to use your warranty or for you to rant at when you feel like it... i think they actually prefer this since you usually leave when you are finished... the alternative would require them to transfer you around with each new one having you wait half an hour to 'review' your issue till you give up... Or if you get lucky, you get put on hold for half an hour so they can go blitz the one person in the building that has a clue and come back and tell you what you already know or have told them you have tried/done already at the beginning of the session.

I've probably just been unlucky, but i dont think its very far from the truth and i had alot of fun writing this regardless

About the notebook...

Not gonna bother with pros and cons, but heres a 'could be betters' and keep in mind that i am very picky and that i am not your average consumer.

Could be betters:
- resolution: text is a little bit too small for comfortable reading, 15 inch with same specs would have been perfect
- panel: vertical viewing angles are bordering unacceptable levels. Ive managed to stay away from tfts thus far and now i remember exactly why.
- speakers: i thought i had heard the worst till i heard these. Someones throwing a good portion of their R&D money into developing the cheapest tiny membranes to pass for laptop speakers... forget about music, even talk radio gives me a headache (if i am in a quiet enough room to hear them). Think of headphones with freq range at around 1-16khz to barely cover coherent speech, now get them off your head and put them on the desk... thats what these sound like. My free phones one loud speaker sounds better then these.
- soundcard: what is the point of hdmi with only 2 channels onboard... sure, to hook it up to your TV, but i could do that with my 7 year old laptop too! If you cant do it right might as well go vga to save money and fix any of the other problems listed here.
- wireless - would have payed for an intel wifi card if i could, also the on/off button needs to be moved/changed, i keep switching it off by mistake several times every day.
- video card - underclocked, which actually is a plus half the time on dx9 games, but for dx10 and recent games it becomes an issue. Also i went out of my way to get nvidia because of their linux drivers, but not this! Nvidia doesnt have a 300 series driver on their site even for windows.
- build quality/looks - dvd drive is hooked up only on one side i think, its loose in there and the case around it bends (feels like its going to brake when you lift the laptop up with your right hand by where the drive is), battery doesnt fit tight (makes noise back there when it shakes). sonys old laptops were great... no gloss, nice textures and good panels. I dont know why they decided to move on to this car paint... its 'stylish' and cute i guess and the white color turned out to be better then i expected, but after the initial wow it finally hit me when i went to sonystyle and saw them frontpaging a pink one... its a damn notebook for chicks!
- other things to note - no esata, usb3

After reading all this you might wonder why i kept it lol. Well, because i got tired of looking and i couldnt find anything better. We live in weird times, noone is interested in serving their customers or in selling you what you need. Creating a vacuum by telling you what you want and sustaining demand at any cost is king.

 

Install the same drivers for the 2xx series. All the G310m is, is a higher clocked G210m. And it's not really NVIDIA's fault for this one, but it won't work in any version of linux with the real NVIDIA drivers, unless you modify the DSDT tables to make it recognize the internal flat panel LCD.

 

That's pretty much were I'm at. I wish they had gone 16:10 instead of 16:9, but the rest of the package is good enough to make me feel like it's good bang for the buck. It sold out again about 1 hr before my credit card company confirmed I get extended warranty. Now we play the waiting game.

 

@XGX2007

Not sure where you heard this, but the 200 driver wont work with 300 cards (at least the 330). Support is supposed to be added for 300 series one of these days (mid march), I think we'll have to wait longer then this because their initial attempt at a 300 driver (195.36.08 nix, 196.75 win) fried peoples cards lol. In any case... if it all goes as planned thats 3 months after the card has been released lol. Someone seriously dropped the ball here and i am not sure what part of all this you find acceptable.

 

@superlou

dont forget bing cashback, its only 5% right now though for bestbuy. was 10% when i got it in january.

 

I don't know if it's just the clean installs. For me, teh battery drain has been very inconsistent. I've unplugged my laptop from work and turned it on an two or three hours later with a 15-20% drain. Other times, I've had the laptop unplugged overnight and only lost 5%. Truly a mystery.