Vaio SZ Dies faster now. A LOT! Whats wrong?

Hey guys, before my SZ120p use to have good battery life of 3.5 hours. Recently, battery life changed all the way down to 1-1.5 hours. I realize that laptop batterys degrade over time but not this fast. Any Ideas? Maybe theres a powerleak some where, although I never dropped it. The battery is good since I used it on another Vaio and its hold a charge. I also used Notebook Hardware Control to monitor the SZ. It says that charge rate is going -15.5W. Don't know if thats normal. All I know is that battery life decreasing faster than before. Any suggestions would really help.

 

Oh yeah, All my settings are in Stamina mode with Ultimate Battery setting in power management.

 

Anyone? I would appreciate it! P.

 

it sounds like a symptom of battery memory, but I'm fairly sure that isnt supposed to happen anymore with the new lion batteries these days.

Anyways the old days with hp's i found the older a windows build got and more crap installed on by the user they eventually did somthing to stuff the power settings and the battery would only last an hour at most. Them days we formatted and reinstalled windows and battery life came back telling us it was the power settings. Was faster then trying to diagnose. I'd suggest that the cheapest suggestion to try first b4 trying a new battery and seeing if that fixes it.

 

Thanks for the reply. I really hope its just a software issue rather than a Hardware one. I was even gonna reformat the drive if all else failed before I spend money, but even that is a big headache.

 

Should I try to reinstall the power managment software from sony or is it a microsoft thing you think?

 

How old is your battery?

In my experience, laptop batteries go over a cliff after 12-18 months of use, even less with heavy use, dropping from the manufacturer's rated runtime to a quarter of of that or less. I have never been able to recover one back to the rated runtime after this has happened. These batteries don't last forever, and this is the signal that it is time to buy a new one .

 

You said you used Notebook Hardware Control - one of the information it can give you is "Battery wear factor", I think it's in "Battery" tab - what is your's?
Even though LiOn batteries shouldn't have so called "memory effect", my 2-years-old Fujitsu laptop holds now only 50% of it's original battery capacity (battery wear factor = 50%). I don't think you can do anything about it, except for new battery.

 

My battery is from January 2006. Do you guys mind if you tell me whats your DISCHARGE rate in stamina mode. I just want to compare how fast my SZ is draining compared to yours. Maybe this will show if theres a leak or something.

 

Also I checked the WEAR Level on NHC and it say that its only 16%. Is that normal? It doesn't seem very high for it to be the battery as the problem.

 

I'm runing on Sz4XN
At Stamina mode, just browser webb and chat MSN. it works around 4 and 30min houres ++ Light at 2. No Wlan,,

Same setting at Speed, it works around 3h and 30 min..

 

THanks for the reply on the stats. What I was concerned about though was the discharge rate in the battery monitoring program like NHC. Mine says that the battery discharges at a rate of -16Watts in stamina mode. Do you have these stats? I would appreciate it very much! I wanna get thing solved already.

 

anyother guesses on what I should do?