Vaio TZ Battery life confusion

Hey guys,

I've recently decided to buy a Vaio TZ series laptop. There are two main reasons I decided on the TZ, compact size, and battery life. Although the TZ is expensive, when I looked around it didn't seem like any other laptop came close for combining these two categories.

Now here is my problem. I'm from Australia, and on the Australian sony website it lists the TZ as having a standard battery life of 11 hours, and 18 hours with the large capacity battery. Phenomenal figures. Obviously it won't actually live up to that claim, but even 7 or 8 hours with normal use would be fantastic.

However, I've just looked up the sony US website, and it lists the standard battery life as "4 to 7.5" hours with the standard battery, and "6 to 11.5" with the large battery.

What the hell?

The model numbers are different in Australia compared to the US, but as far as I can tell (not being an expert) the two models I'm comparing on each website seem to be equivalent.

Here they are:

Australian website: http://www.sony.com.au/vaio/catalog/product.jsp;jsessionid=1GGDNHT44YK0WCWSCFCSFEQK0IIUIIV0?id=VGNTZ26gnw&_requestid=135048

US website: http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&productId=8198552921665181588

So if anyone can clear this up for me, give me the facts, that would be great.

 

its been said that if u tweak it enough, u can get 6.5 hours of real world usage.

 

hmm, that doesn't seem as impressive as I was hoping. so is vaio tz the king of small laptops in terms of battery life or not? Is there anything better?

 

I bought my TZ in asia but out of curiosity I have noticed differences in the batteries that are available in Aus and US. It would seem that in the US they offer a small, large and extra large capacity sized batteries. In Aus it would seem they only offer the large and extra large. This is implied by the battery model codes which are the same in both Aus and US. I could well be incorrect but that was what I came to notice.

 

Hmm, despite this, the battery they are listed as coming with on both the US and Aus web page has the same model code.

It seems strange to me that sony australia would be claiming a longer battery life for the same battery. That's pretty dodgy...

 

australia could be using different voltage.

 

Mains voltage would have nothing to do with battery life.

It is possible that Sony Australia did not update the battery times when the T series moved to dual core CPUs. My Sony G11 (with single core U1500 CPU) can manage its claimed 9 hours on a standard battery but the dual core CPUs do use a bit more power and hence shorten the battery time.

User reports of actual performance are the best indicator.

John

 

I apologize for my ignorance, wouldn't/shouldn't it be possible to disable one of the cores when not needed to maximize battery life on an ultraportable? I think ULV processors cannot but other certain processors can.

 

That's a valid point about switching off one core. I think it is possible to set Windows' boot.ini to use only one core, but I suspect that the other core will sit there leaking power even if doing nothing.

If there were an easy way to disable one core from using power for a "stamina" mode then I would expect Sony would have implemented it, a bit like the SZ's switchable graphics. This would be a very useful enhancement to any dual core notebook.

John

 

Claimed battery life and real life battery life are two TOTALLY different things. I'm getting about 3.5 hours of real life battery life from my TZ195 with the standard battery. That's with screen set full bright; wireless working; DVD drive being used. Probably get more if you turn the screen down and disable wireless and take some other power saving measures.

I am very happy; that is fantastic battery life for an ultraportable. My previous notebook -- Toshiba R200 -- got a bit less than two hours.