Z13 with SSD: Best power settings?

Hi,

I've had my Z for a couple of months now but am still a bit confused by all the power options.

I use it as a Desktop replacement, plugged in and switched on 99% of the day and many nights as well. I use it to serve media, and download, so I prefer the hard disk doesn't go to sleep.

I like it quiet especially at night, but I like power when I need it. If you know what I mean.

I never ever ever use the DVD drive.

My question is:

1. What is the best graphics setting?
2. How should I set up the battery protection so my battery doesn't die young?
3. Should I set up battery and on charge with different settings?
4. Should I have the SSD power down, and if I do will it stay alive while downloading and power up on demand when the network share is accessed?
5. How do I get the keyboard to stay backlit, but turn off when the screen turns off?

Thanks!

 

1. I guess you mean best performance? Install Community Hybrid drivers and switch to speed mode or hack your BIOS, set graphics switching policy to static and install latest NVIDIA driver pack.

2. If you use it 99% on AC power (as you mentioned), go into Vaio control panel and set it 50% battery care. Your battery will be charged to 50% which is the best charge for long-term storage of the battery. Your battery will last years without noticeable wear with that. If you dont need it in your computer, charge it to 50% and store it at a cool dry place.

3. If you want maximum runtime on battery vs. max performance on AC, just set that in windows energy options. Chose stamina graphics mode for extended battery runtime. If you want maximum performance, dont forget to set the cooling policy to something different as quiet since in quiet mode it throttles your CPU when under load (=annoying stutters and lags).

4. You dont need that. Spinning drives consume power and are noisy, that's why in the 90's the HDD spindown feature came up. Unfortunately, until today, it doesn't work well because windows wakes up the drive frequently due to useless indexing, page file and random HDD access. In contrast to that, your SSD virtually consumes no power when idling and anyways does not make any noise at all. I don't know wether the sleep command will be dropped by the RAID controller. Even if it will be passed to all SSDs (and they support "spindown"), I dont see an advantage in doing that - noise and energy-wise. In any case, your SSDs would wake up very fast (since there is no motor that needs to spin up the drive before it gets ready). So you can try that.

5. The keyboard backlight is connected to the environment light sensor above the F9 key. You can set the keyboard backlight to always on in the darkness, but it won't be switched off with the screen.

 

Thanks!

Shame you can't tie the keyboard lighting to the screensaver. Makes sense.

I'm still trying to figure out what I have to gain by updating to the community graphics driver. Is it worth the hassle?

 

Some say better performance, as newer drivers usually mean better optimization and use of resources... I mean, if you got time, why not? In any case, they should change the instructions to be a little noob friendlier... because you have to install the new drivers, reboot(at this point your laptop will be at like 1024x800 res or something), THEN sign them. The rebooting scared me ****less as i wasn't prepared for it.