Vaio Z battery life tests

I've been tweaking away at my Sony Z over the past few days, and today the battery lasted 7 hours ... on the 6-cell battery

I did a good bit of web surfing and programming. Had about 56-60 processes runnning most of the time.
This is why I got this laptop, but it's exceeded my expectations by quite a bit
Yay!

It makes me wonder how much I could get out of an extended battery...

 

Nice . Pretty interesting to know what the Z is capable of with some tweaking.

You should write a guide to help others do the same

 

Very nice. I agree with ac500 that with some tweaking you could get even more time.

OT - Sorry about the title change; this is PG forum

 

lol, sorry about that...


yeah, a guide would be a good idea.
I basically just combined a lot of other guides, and some sites about vista services. Let me see if I can get a list together.

 

Im waiting for ur guide bravo

 

I want to tweak it too.

Are you making your screen so dim you cant see anything?

 

I use the 9 cell battery an i can get about 13 hours by tweaking it a little

 

13 hours?!?!?!? Isn't hte max battery life for the 9 cell 9 hours?

 

How many hrs can you get from the default battery?

Can I get 4 hrs out of it watching 2 movies?

 

The battery life of all other people are longer than mine. I have only 2 hrs work with my nomal battery.

 

4hrs watching movie is doable. 9hr on standard battery is a lie unless you do close to nothing or not using it at all.... 12hrs on extended battery is a lie!!!

UNLESS you undervolted your processor then I got 15hrs on extended battery doing minimum task (doing paper, no wifi, no bluetooth, everything to lowest setting + undervolted)

 

Agree with Phoebush, no wifi for > 10 ? worthless for buying an expensive laptop, but if u increase form 6 to 7 hour, please teach me, ty

 

I using 5hrs on standard battery with Z570N/B

 

my battery is standard, and is kinda loose in the back.. any1 having problems like this?

 

No. On my Z, there's a miniscule amount of movement - barely noticeable (much less than on my Toshiba U300, and that doesn't bother me either).

How loose are you talking? Just a bit of wobble or does it feel as if it's not mounted right? The new design for the Z battery should in theory make it wobble less than previous Vaios with the battery-hinge design, I think.

 

i get 13 hours of battery with wifi on using a large capacity battery

 

ive topped mine at 6 hrs 30 mins before

 

6 hrs max for me on standard battery

 

Is that with real usage - browsing/office, etc - or just with the laptop switched on and idle?

It's certainly an impressive figure... higher than I'd expect judging by my experience with the standard battery.

 

so where is the tweaking guide?! same question over here, just idling or surfing, chatting, typing?

 

Its actually longer than 9 hours. You can easily hit 13 hours

 

You should have seen some of the older ones. Clacky batteries were the bane of some supposedly flagship Sony's for a long time. Detracted hugely from otherwise near-perfect build quality.

I haven't done anything official but generally speaking I'd say about 5 hours with pretty aggressive power saving enabled in all respects. Doubt I've ever hit 6. I haven't picked up extended batteries yet - For uses involving longer life I'm still sticking with the TZ's and SZ's with extended batteries. I'm going to get slightly more of my money's worth out of them before I replace all of them with Z's and TT's.

 

how many sony notebooks do you own???

 

Quite a lot - although I'll be doubling up in addition to what I need for a few months from now as I probably inevitably switch over to the new Sony machines. I dunno about you guys but whenever I buy into a laptop for intensive use, I buy into the 'system' - so in addition to having one each wherever I work, there's a lot of extra batteries, docks, etc as well as spares that I need to buy and sprinkle around the places I work in, so I have to be pretty sure I like the machine.

The SZ is probably my all-time favourite so far for something that's actually portable over the course of a day, and the TZ's are equally useful, even more 'all-day' compliments to the SZ's, so I still use the ones I have in the main because I've built up that 'system'. I used to have a fair number of Apple notebooks and still keep up - more for the image and great design than the Fisher-Price OS and the marketing-led but ultimately crap product engineering - and I occasionally buy Lenovos and other such machines but honestly, I've found that nothing else balances understated style for business, build quality, performance and utility like the flagship Sony's do time and time again.

The Z is an improvement and I'm sure I'll end up liking it better, but for now it's still in the evaluation stage. The TT, I'm not so sure is such a level of improvement - but I'll make the upgrade call when / if I'm happy with them.

 

I only get around 3-4 hours max using is as a netbook doing surfing and wifi. :-( Power Saver, balanced, screen brightness half way, bluetooth, WWAN off, stamina mode.

I've reinstalled Vista Ultimate 64bit so can't turn off the DVD drive.

Not checked how many processes are running.

 

Are you using Quiet Mode for the CPU/Cooling Performance setting? I think that could make quite a difference. Also, given that you're using Vista, disabling Aero could improve your times. It's also worth following the undervolting guide.

 

For optimal results Vaio control center should be in silent mode (like Infy said) and Vista should be on energy saving.

 

Thanks. I also have around 110 processes even after a rebuild... :-S

 

problem solved...

 

bbasra are you running a server on your computer? When i got my laptop back from Sony i booted it up and found out that they put my laptop into diagnostics mode and left it like that. I swicthed it back to normal mode but i found out that when i looked at my task manager that it was booting up server stuff.

Anyway i opened up system config again and i selected selective start up and i then i went to the startup and bootup tab and unchecked what i did not want to run. Unless you can account for all those processes bbasra i would suggest that you do this as well.

I had uninstalled Picasa and other stuff but it still was enabled in my startup but they are not anymore. I now have about 56 processes when i boot up which is not bad at all for Vista. I didn't even do a clean install and my laptop runs fine.

 

lol, it seems like server is running.

I rebuilt my system using vista 64-bit so no crap on there other than what i've installed.

I apps in my taskbar like:

AnyDVD, Kaspersky, BackupExec System Recovery.

I think i should go through the process and eliminate whats not required.

 

What term of battery life can I expect if i'm planning to use Z for internet serfing via mobile phone (3G - HSDPA/HSUPA) on the high level of display brightness:
If I use the standart battery?
If I use the extended battery?

 

Every single person claiming improved battery life "with some tweaking" , including - most notably - mister Tennis - has failed to give even a single hint of *what* they did to improve battery life.

Therefore rendering this thread utterly useless.

Would you guys who are bragging about 7 to 13 hours of battery life please give some details? Tennis, you repeated the exact same sentence 4 times and said nothing of *how* you got 13 hours.

My opinion - on a full charge, doing literally nothing but having wifi on, not even with any programs open, on a large capacity battery - for the "Z" to tell me it has only 3:47 mins of life left, is unacceptable. I am coming from a "TT" and a "TZ", both of which routinely got 7 - 10 hours. Of course that was Windows XP. Someone please advise as to how they improved battery life on this model.

 

7 hours is pretty easy to get, with no activity, on a brand new battery. Just do a clean Vista install, stop as many services and processes as possible, and undervolt. Should be enough, or disable items such as Vista aero and other resource hogging components, should do the trick. This is with half brightness by the way, at full brightness it will probably be less.

 

What are the downsides of undervolting the processor?

 

There aren't any, that's why everyone should do it. Here's a link for you to read all about it.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=235824&highlight=undervolting

Also, keep in mind that 7 hours is with the integrated graphics. If you have the Nvidia graphics you should probably shave off 2 hours or so.

 

Aero of, using a flash block and no-script in Firefox for just general web surfing with 40% brightness in power saver mode with wifi on and BT and WWAN disabled should be able to reach about 6 hrs battery life.
Also, disabling start up processes by using the system misconfig option will help.
These steps might be enough for you so that you don't actually need to undervolt your processor.

 

Oh yes, which reminds me that in addition, you could also quickly disable the DVD-RW drive (and BT as mentioned above) if you aren't using it to see an increase in battery life on an idle unit (and when you're using it too of course.)

And of course, when actually using the laptop use plugins as described above etc. etc.

 

... unless they have a CPU with a multiplier that's not a whole number, in which case undervolting will cause the CPU to run at a lower speed than before.
E.g. the P9500 running at 2.53 GHz has a 9.5x multiplier, and will run at 9x, or 2.4 GHz if you undervolt. That's a downside.

 

You can always tell RMClock to undervolt when on battery and not touch anything when on full power. And on battery going down from 2.53 GHz to 2.4 GHz is a good thing. I'd even go as far as unchecking a couple of highest multipliers for the RMClock battery profile.

 

Well now im all confused again. He said there are *no* downsides to undervolting your processor.

Do you feel that doing all these things is worthwhile, to avoid undervolting?

Disabling Aero completely is a big change to the user experience. Trying to work on a laptop at 40% brightness is almost sheer torture (for me). Then that long list of disabling all start up processes and BT and WWAN ....

If there are no downsides to undervolting, why punish ones-self like that? hehe.

Thx!

 

Ok, 40% brightness when on battery is quite reasonable to me and is fine for a lot of people, but that won't be ok for everyone and it does not appear to be ok for you.
I don't personally undervolt my processor. It is a personal choice really. I just don't like the to have any extra apps running if i can help it and especially not when i am on battery.
Some people also undervolt so to try and reduce their fan noise but I have no need for that.

Go ahead and undervolt your processor and see what that does for your battery life. If your still not happy then may be try other steps to improve your battery life. Some people also do undervolt and use the steps that i suggested. You don't sound so keen on what i suggested so try and undervolt first and see where that goes.

Disabling BT and WWAN is quite standard. It should be fine if you just disabled the wwan using the smart wi tool. To get to the misconfig just type in system config in your start up menu and then disable what you don't need at start up.

I can gain about an extra hour of battery life using those steps i gave in my other post.

Unless you need to see flash ads when surfing then it makes sense to block the ads when on battery to get better battery life.

 

The *downside* is that it takes a few hours of testing because you need to do CPU stress tests for every other multiplier, some people don't have the time of course. And an extra icon running on the bottom right of your taskbar. Hardly anything intimidating, not like you have to pull out the CPU and solder pins or anything. It's purely software-related. Cooler CPU = longer overall laptop life, generally speaking, and more battery life of course. Intel's default "safety" multiplier is way too high.