Z890 - Max Battery Life for word processing on transatlantic flights....

I did a search and read various thread on the older Sony Vaio Z battery life. However, these are all in the year 2008 and pre Windows 7.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/317231-vaio-z-battery-life-tests.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/315925-vaio-z-reviewers-getting-9hr-battery-life-2.html

I do a fair bit of transatlantic flights. So I'd like to know what battery life I can get with the Sony Z890, Windows 7, with all processes such as WIFI, Bluetooth etc turned off and being used in word processing and reading mode using the integrated graphics, with brightness at 50%. SLOW is fine as word processing is easy.

Anyone has a sense of the battery life I should get?

What if I turn on WIFI and use it as a netbook for surfing at airports?

I can't seem to find a recent discussion on battery life. The 2008 threads has a huge disparity with some people claiming something like 9 hours doing basic stuff! Hard to believe but thought I'd check with you guys.

Thanks,
UL

 

With the standard battery, my Z26 (old-second gen) manages about 4 and a half hours with your stated requirements. With full power saver settings (I tweaked the default plan a bit) and minimum brightness, as well as the SILENT fan mode settings, I can manage about 6 and a half hours doing just word stuff, tops...

The 9 hours I think is with the extended battery, which considering what I'm able to achieve with the standard one, is very much possible. I don't own an extended battery so can't help you too much there...

I can still achieve these times, considering my Z is now 1.5 years old.

If you use wifi and IE with the power-saver plan, I do believe that will cut a good 2-3 hours off your battery span; it comes down to what you are doing (youtube, or basic text)?

 

Wow, that is not very long battery life. So in short, it does not have any better life than the current i5/i7 Z version. I guess the chips consume similar watts, and the SSD may be less power consumption than the HD. For some reason I thought that the Z890s will have longer battery life . I read somewhere wheres someone with extended battery life claimed up to 13 hours! Even with exaggeration, that is still a whopping number.

I wonder if anyone else care to comment.

Thanks,
UL

 

Considering that the standard battery has 6 cells and the extended loaded with 9 (a 50% increase in battery life), +3 (or even 4) hours more to give a total of about 9 or 10 hours is more realistic. With the settings that you wish to use the VAIO Z at during the flights, I'd give it about 7-8 hours with the extended.

I can probably achieve the 13 hours if I let my machine idle with the large battery, and I can get about 8 hours with my standard battery just 'idling'.

A note; if you see a stated battery life by any manufacturer, always count down by a few hours or read the footnotes to check out what limitations the device was tested with.
Though the curious thing is the standard battery for the older Z has been 'underated' by Sony themselves; it's actually capable of more than 5 usable hours that the specs originally state.

And the new Z's actually are more power efficient taking into account their specs. The i7 and the 330m are power-hungry, and the fact that they still have considerably similar battery spans is quite a feat. I'd guess the SSDs do consume less power, and it does have a bigger fan than the older Zs so less of the intense spinning to keep the temps in check.

 

I used to spend a lot of time fretting on battery life. Now I just buy a second battery or an extended battery - problem solved. Any transatlantic flights I've taken have had power receptacles (it's been a while I think they were the air-power style) so battery life wasn't an issue.

 

Regarding SSD vs. HDD, HDDs are very tricky to work with for power saving. Depending on the usage pattern you may or may not want HDD to spin-down. It's during spin-up that HDD power consumption peaks, so, if you need to access hard drive periodically - watching movie, browsing (browser reads/writes page cache on disk) - then you may prefer to leave disk spinning (it takes much less power to sustain spinning). If you work in word processor and hit Save very rarely, you'd want to let disk spin-down.

Regarding transatlantic flights, with take-off, landing, breaks for food, and catching some sleep, I usually get maybe 4 hours to use laptop. Add a couple of hours in airports, unless you have a very long break waiting for connection flight. Not very demanding on laptop battery typically.