Vaio CW Battery Drain Information

im a cw26 user and had notice this battery drainage issue after the 1st week but till now only saw this thread. i've did some small test myself before this.

test1, i hibernate it before i go to school at 80%, after school (8hour) it left 9% or 20minutes (without unplugging the battery) when i on it on the train but i can still work on it for 1 hour, so i think its some BIOS battery calculation error.

i figured that its simply too insane so after that i always discharge my battery after hibernating. it will drop 15-25% each time i reopen it. (3 hours till recess, 3 hours till after school) so everyday my 3.5hour of battery life, half of them were gone and others are just nice for me to online, typing and music on the train and recess. means now i need a full charge everyday once i go back home so that i can bring it out the next day.

then i found this thread and tried f&f (discharge the battery for 1 minute), i hibernate it during recess at 33%, after school (3hour) on the train it left 9% indicates left 20 minutes. but i can still type my report and listen to music for 1 hour and the battery level is still the same. so i think its the battery calculator went wrong.

the only thing that bugs me is sometimes when i open my laptop it hits critical level and then it will force hibernate.

p/s i did not try BIOS shut down because i never shut down my laptop. only hibernate.

 

hmm I tried shutdown completely and flip the battery then plug in again (within a minute since i'm slow in these things and my compt has a bunch of plugs for external hdd, external monitor, notebook fan etc) when I woke up, it was still 50% (i only let the laptop to charge up to 50% as I don't bring it around much and use ac adapter almost all the time)
So it doesnt seem too bad a solution. I am not sure why you guys don't like complete shutdown since it only takes less than 1 minute to start up...

 

because it takes 1 minute for the same purpose as complete shutdown (it supposed to be), no offence tho. and i can have my blog post write till halfway and can continue it once i open without access to internet on the train.

 

Seeing as this is probably the best way of getting Sony's attention (thanks engadget) we should probably include a list of all affected models and the related threads so they can see that its not just the CW but many affected models. Gotta help our fellow Sony VAIO brothers. =P

Heres the ones I found (please list any i miss and the thread link)

Sony SR (my PC model)

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=282258&highlight=battery+drain

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

Sony SZ
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=48354&highlight=fw+battery+drain

I know the FW and Some of the newer models are having the same issue but was unable to find a official thread for them.

 

So I'm really curious, does anyone actually know when battery drainage was a critical issue (greater than 10% drain) after a complete shutdown on these VAIO machines? I mean, if these machines are pretty recent, then Sony should issue an update to fix this. If this issue was observed in the past years, and Sony didn't fix this, then they probably won't fix the present ones.

 

Sadly we had to force Sony to enable VT-x. If we don't fix this, I don't believe Sony will.

 

maybe im better off returning this laptop. but sadly i can't find another laptop w/ the same specs for the same price. and im stuck w/ getting ti a tbest buy (i have a $1000 store credit)

 

I have a feeling that if more users basically talk about it, maybe Sony will fix it if they are smart. I mean, hell, this is a serious problem that apparently affects all of the CW's that I know of. I have two CW27's and they BOTH suffer from prominent battery drainage after shutdown.

All I can think of to actually get Sony's attention is just probably putting out bad press, like how Engadget is doing. Maybe if someone have the knowledge and experience can compile a custom BIOS to fix this. I for sure have no idea how that will be done easily. lol

 

Why did none of you Digg the Engadget story? I dont even have a Sonny and I submitted it to Digg.

http://digg.com/hardware/Sony_s_VAIO_CW_draining_the_battery_while_asleep

 

Does the issue ONLY occur with sleep or with Hybernate too?

Does it apply to the i5 CW too?

 

Sleep, Hibernate and Shut down. And yes on the i5

 

we need to get more people to start digging this. this is a really frustrating problem with an otherwise awesome laptop

 

I can confirm the removal of the battery for a few seconds trick works. I have an FW, charged it to 80% shut down and removed the battery for a few seconds. After 3 days start up shows 78%.

I used it for an hour last night and it got down to about 40%, shut down and start it up this morning without removing the battery. The light was flashing and it was down to 8%.

This is unacceptable, my Samsung NC10 net book which I use once a week does not loose any charge even when its hibernating after a month!

 

Since the "lift the battery" trick seems to work, what is the minimum amount of time that works for everyone?

I tried 10 seconds, but that what not long enough for me, since the battery still had a discharge. I think I'm going to try 20 seconds and then 30 seconds, and then post back what I get.

 

this is weird. Last time i shut the computer down, unplug the charger (don't remmeber before or after the shutdown), did a lift and plug in again, it worked well for me. when i woke up, the battery was still at the level the night before.
Last night, I ran this compt on battery then shut it down, lifted the battery. Morning I woke up, it went from 33% the night before to 13% (and still said 44 minutes left). it took me less than 1 hour to charge it up to 50%.
I don't get why it worked before and not last night.

 

Im sure many of you know this by now but I have confirmed on my cw that there is no actual "battery drain".

The actual problem for me (and others as I have read) is that the battery level reported is inaccurate. Yesterday I powered up my laptop and on battery started with 80% and used it until the battery reported 53%. Then I let the unit put itself to sleep and then hybernate by just not using it.

This morning I started it up and the batter reported 13%. Youd think at 13% I would have 15 minutes or so before the battery goes dead and the unit shuts down. Well Im happy to report that Ive been on my laptop for over an hour now and the meter still reads 13%.

So good new and bad news.
Good news is that there is no real battery drain going on.
Bad news is something is wrong with the battery meter and its causing me(and others) to believe there is a battery drain issue.

Hopefully this is something that can be fixed through sony with a bios update.

 

I guess the good news then is that this is more so related to a software issue rather than hardware up to this point, right? If so, a software BIOS update shouldn't be a problem to fix this!

 

Hi all, this post is meant for everyone following the thread. I hope it can clarify some important points being discussed, especially for people who just joined the discussion.

I did some simple experiments; I think I can conclude the following points: -

1) there's no actual battery drain
2) battery meter is not accurate, either with battery care enabled or not.
3) nevertheless, battery meter will notify when level drops to 10% (or whatever setting you use for low level notification). so it's working, just not refreshing the display sometimes.
4) battery care will prolong your battery lifetime, especially useful for people who uses AC most the time, it effectively charges to preset level, for AC user, 40-50% is recommended. so, if you decide to leave your battery in the laptop, it's advisable to enable battery care.
5) No fix so far (to my knowledge), but I'm sure someone will think of something, just keep checking the web every few weeks

Also like to add, I think it's unfair to jump to conclusions, and damage someone's reputation unnecessarily. we need to analyze patiently before making conclusions.

for those thinking of getting a VAIO CW, go ahead, there's nothing wrong with this laptop, it might even pleasantly surprise you because of its plain design.

Happy computing everyone.

 

Rather bluntly, the Z owners here have gone through an exhaustive list of scenarios and there is drainage of some sort (at least, on the Zs).

As stupidolive has mentioned, my Z is like that when I do what you just did. And when I start my Z up without plugging her in, Windows indicates a lower level, but the battery level doesn't change for a good 30 minutes or so. Actually increases in my case so...

And I think we need to accuse Sony for this - they expect us to believe a drain of such magnitude is a feature. Well they can stick these batteries back up their arses for all I care if that's the case. Sony's a bleeding company as it is, and issues like this on their flagship laptops (the new Z being one) is NOT going to do it any favours.

But the current VAIO owners getting a fix is slim. Like I have said earlier, those not suffering the drain may have newer, updated components on their machines. Either that, or we need a BIOS update of some sort...

 

im a i5 cw user and i did the shut down test yesterday. NO battery drainage at all if i shutdown and boot up using AC (before sleep and after wakeup) with my battery in (no flip flick). which means for my laptop, theres no so called background softwares that eats battery life when i shut if off. but for hibernating, yes it does, havent test whether is battery meter wrong or theres real drainage, will use a multimeter to check whether there is current flowing or not tomorrow. FTW......

 

Hi - new to the forum - I posted this morning on the CW forum regarding my new laptop draining the battery when shut down. THen I saw this thread - looks like my problem is not unique!!

Anyway, I read this entire thread and have seen 4-5 different "fix" suggestions, some posters saying it is NOT battery drain, but a software issue; others saying it IS a drain issue... etc etc,

In other words - a typical thread - lot's of folks with lots of good suggestions.

But I think we need some sort of detailed summary of work-arounds at this point for the newbies coming on - and maybe a link to support it instead of a response on the thread. That would be helpful perhaps.

One question - for both the BIOS shutdown and Battery Lift work-arounds mentioned in this thread - you cannot use these workarounds in Sleep or Hibernate mode, correct? You can only use these for a full shutdown?

Another question - is there a definitive answer if this is a hardware or a software battery metering problem? I saw the expected "damage control" post that said it was NOT a battery / hardware issue - but software. Is this true?? I am taking this with a grain of salt at this point because the post felt motivated out of damage and bottom lline control written by someone affiliated with Sony!!! (sorry, it did).

I am ready to call and return this, this problem is a showstopper for me if it is a true hardware issue. The fact this exists on a laptop is an outrage!! It is bad enough these have such short battery life in the first place... a problem like this makes this a desktop and not a laptop!!

 

Had another question after mulling this over for a minute...

If this problem is purely software / battery metering issue - then how does shutting down from the BIOS or lifting the battery out and re-inserting after the laptop ia powered down remedy this?

I cannot make the connection between this being a software issue and the fact the suggested workarounds are working!! The software that executes the metering should not have any "knowledge" that the battery was lifted out and re-inserted when it was powered off... or so it would seem...

Anyone? Bueller?

 

I agree, this morning after boot my battery meter displayed 23% charge left. I was on web for close to 1 1/2 hours before it warned me to plug the ac in. I'm getting about 3 1/2 hours on mine when fully charged, obviously surfing the web and checking email mainly.

 

I agree. I shut down compt at around 40-45% battery left. Turned it on around 2 hours later and 20% left... but the battery meter didn't move to 18% or 19% until about 45 mins later (during which time i watched some youtube and used my external monitor)
This just means incorrect battery information.

 

Has ANYONE tried a 3rd party battery yet? I find it odd that this made it 13 pages but only 6 people dug my link and no one has seem to have tried a 3rd party battery.

I believe that something in teh ACHI we written wrong and donest talk to the battery correctly

 

INteresting... what I find odd is that this problem has been well-chronicled here, for both the CW and Z series... and with literally hundreds of posts elsewhere.... and we are saying that nobody has caught this fact that the battery was actually not drained, and it is merely a battery monitoring / reporting issue??

I find this initially hard to believe (and why i said I was taking it "with a grain of salt" in my last post)... but willing to buy the facts if it is true!

After reading, I have already charged my laptop to 100 percent, put it in sleep mode, and will fire it back up in 8 hrs or so... and then I will ignore the battery meter reading, and see how long I get out of the battery. (I do know I am getting in the neighborhood of 2.5 hrs now on a full battery without running any hardware / disk intensive apps).

I will be interested to see what happens...

 

On a side note have you tweaked your power profiles? Im only asking because you said your only getting 2.5 hours on a full charge and not doing any intesive apps. If you tweak your power profiles a little and reduce your image brightness to 20% or less you can pull 3 - 3.5 easy.

Also it helps alot to get rid of some of the crapware that comes installed too. The freaking Sony media software was constantly indexing my disk and never I mean NEVER stopped. After removing that crap I noticed an improvement in performance and battery life.

 

I agree that you should take it with a grain of salt. I flip my battery for 1-2 -5 seconds and I stilll see the info wrong after that 2 hours shut down =)) All I care is if I have to fly home which takes a long time, what can I do to preserve battery? since I plug it in AC 99.999% of the time, worst come to worst when I fly home, I just take the battery out.
However, for my case, it's not bad at all. I used the computer constantly (Internet, MS office) for nearly 2 hours and the battery was from 80% to above 40%. So I am totally content with my laptop.
My final comment is that you just need to check your laptop and be happy heheh ow, return the computer

 

tjsexton, did you just mentioned SLEEP? u will die. XD

laptop draining battery during SLEEP is common, just the matter of how much and sony had done in it.

the issue here is battery draining during HIBERNATING and SHUT DOWN because a laptop in these 2 modes should be totally offed, without any background apps running. in these 13 pages, ppl are suspecting some ty programme in either the battery or the motherboard is eating battery even we shut it off. So, the software is not 'to detect a flip and flick' but to disconnect the current just like you pull out the plug of an electronic device.

 

interesting. Going to let my laptop sleep overnight tonight, then watch some HD movies and see how much time I get out of it and see if the battery was actually drained or not.

 

We got my mother a CW for Xmas this year - it's one of the core2duo models in the UK, not the more recent i5s, and she's been complaining about the battery since she got it. She's not techno-literate in any way, so I've been blaming it on her inability to use hibernate/sleep correctly, but...

Does disabling the Sony battery service and relying on Win 7 64-bit make any difference?

 

Hi, newbie is here.

I always love Sony for its products. I've got a new CW21FX last week (my first lappy) and have experienced the same problem with the battery. I thought something bad is going on with my battery but thank God, i found this thread.

Sunday night, I enabled the Battery Care function (80%) and go to bed with 67% remaining on battery. Monday morning, about 11 AM, I started it up and my battery metery reported that there is only 28% left (44 mins), which means the battery has drained off 40% after 12h!! I didn't plug the AC in and continued to use it but after an hour, the metery reported "1h02 mins (38%) remaining" So the metery is not accurate at all.

The flip and lift tricks works excellently, thank God T___T I did a test yesterday:

4 PM: Charge 100%, shut it down, battery out, AC off. 1 min later: battery in.
10.30 PM: Start in up, AC still off: 97% remaining.
I used it for more than 2 hours and it says 37% left then go to bed, no flip lift. This morning, i woke up with 23 mins (12%) remaining. Until now, i've worked on it for more than 45 mins and just now, it reported i need to plug AC in.

So from now on I just ignore the battery report. Flip lift when i need to and wait for an official response from Sony. (desperately?)

 

All people uses Windows 7? Anyone have tried use other OS?

 

I think you are on to something here... I started work at 6:53 am with 24% remaining, and at 7:30, there is still about the same amount of time remaining.

Note when first starting up, the battery meter does not show the Minutes Remaining, only shows the % remaining. After about 10 minutes, it started showing the minutes remaining in addition to the %. From about 7am to 7:30, it has been constant at 47 min remaining.

So I too am now beginning to question whether there is actually any physical battery drain - seems like a software monitoring issue... I personally need to do more testing / verification (it's the engineer in me ;-)) but initial results lean toward no physical battery drain going on...

 

Oh, btw, Sony still really needs to fix this issue ASAP - this has to be costing them more time / money already than the investment in making a fix.

I can't count the number of software issues that started out as hardware / other issues in my past life... no surprise, but it is still just as critical it gets fixed...

Sometimes folks breath a sigh of relief when they find out its "only" a software problem (notice the reaction on the board). To me its still just as serious as if it were a real battery drain issue.

 

Haven't people in this thread already shown that the battery will eventually drain to completely DEAD while the machine is off? If it was just software reporting the wrong level there should still be a charge.
Am I wrong?

 

Yes... however I caught the error after my post... thanks for catching it. I realize sleep mode does not completely shut down the box like hibernate / shutdown, and it keeps the box in a more "ready" state (processes still running, peripherals low power mode) so it can start up faster - and this burns battery calories.

I put it in hibernate mode instead....

EDIT:

BTW, I was able to get almost an hour and a half (90 min) total working time after my battery reporting 24% and 45 min remaining time when I turned my laptop on this morning. So, as a small data point, the battery meter was off by 100%... not saying I have fully concluded what is causing this, but its a data point. Also note that this was after using it for 45 min or more at my parents house last night showing some pics / movies from a recent trip, and also working for about 30 min earlier in the day working at home. So considering total battery working time of 2.5 - 3.0 hours, one can point to a metering problem...

One more point - I have been running the TD Ameritrade Streamer console - which for those not familiar, this updates stock prices, trade volume, etc real time on your computer - and I have some 30 stocks on the monitoring board. This keeps the box working a bit more when you walk away and / or pause... so my battery time should be somewhat less than someone not having a labor intensive app running in the background.

I am going to keep doing my own testing / verification. One other thing that has me noodling is the post regarding third party batteries being tried... there is some similarity to the behavior of an old, weak, or even inferior battery (fast initial discharge curve, erratic reporting). HOWEVER, what throws a monkey wrench in this angle is that if you turn on the box starting with 100% battery charge, and worked continuously until the battery drains - it seems you get the commensurate 3 hrs work time (YMMV) with a smooth battery discharge curve, represented by the battery meter. (no erratic metering behavior).

 

Just got my CW today, great machine so far, I'm uninstalling a lot of the useless software. After the battery charges up I'll start my own testing on the battery issue. Aside from that this seems like an amazing machine.

 

Ok, I have had my CW for about 4hrs now.

I charged it up to 100% while I un-installed all the junk I don't need then put it to sleep while on A/C at 5pm. at 7:15 I opened up my CW and it had only used 2% of the battery life, and that is after waking it up at 6pm to check on it then putting it back to sleep, when it had only lost 1%. So right now I am at a 1% loss per hour battery drain while in Sleep mode.

 

I'm beginning to agree with the idea that it might not be a real battery drain problem but it might just be centralized in the faulty battery meter. Today I charged my laptop to 100% and took it off the A/C at 5:05. About two minutes ago, it shut itself down once it reached 0% of battery life. So roughly, I got about 3 hours out of this battery mainly on web surfing, music in the background, some chat windows, and a couple of downloads. It did stay at 5% battery life for about 20-30 minutes though.

 

I am experiencing the same thing. my batter is at "5%" but it's been on for the past 20 minutes....

 

In my experience, the battery bar is usually drastically incorrect but there is also real battery drain going on at a much faster rate than any other laptop out there. It's frustrating...Sony has totally screwed up on everything battery-related with these laptops.

Thanks,
GR

 

2% over 2 hrs is the same rate as my Unibody MacBook.

 

I am starting to think it's not "one or the other" now myself - it could be both!! (metering AND drain problem).

- Is the battery meter faulty? Yes, I believe so at this point... at least my testing (and apparently others) is showing that.

- Is there a battery drain problem (in addition)? Hmmm... I don't have enough data to state or verify at this point, but something is not right in the logs / times I have when comparing working uniterrupted for 100% battery to 0%, compared to working with interruptions and shutting the box down without plugging back in for charging. Something is not right....

 

Well at roughly 11:30 I put my CW to sleep, at 1:26 It only says 1% was lost.

Everything seems normal to me.

 

Well, there it is then... Alec has had his for a few hours now, and its fine. Guess the rest of us have been imagiing this... ;-) There must be no problem at all!!

 

Did you guys get the sony update the other day for power management? I just got it yesterday and I am wondering if it has helped the problem because the battery status seems to be better with only about 10% loss over night in sleep mode. I have not had a chance to test shutdown usage I will do that tonight. I got the update through Sony's little update utility. It was called Vaio Power Management Update..

 

I put it to sleep at 71% at 2am and at 12 pm it was at 56%, so far I don't have any battery loss thats any different then my MacBook.

Either they fixed something, or it takes a while for the problem to show it's head.

 

Interesting. I did install the latest power mgt software as another poster mentioned, lets see if this has any impact...

Also, I am headed toward a clean install more and more every day... this and other factors are the reason. I wonder how much that will help.

 

Well I've gotten over 4hrs(just) with just internet and IM over wireless on a full charge.

My battery sleep percentage was 1-1.5% per hr of sleep UNTILL I hit the ~52% mark, then it went to 28% after 1.5hrs of sleep. Then it woke with 28% but I still got another near 2hrs out of the charge, showing it was still about 50% charged.

After about 90min of sleep my laptop auto-hibernates do they all do this?