I'm looking for a new notebook at the moment, and it might well be the Z21MN/B. The trouble is that I am pretty suspicious about the battery life specifications. I just want to make sure that the 6 hours battery life in stamina mode are not some developer's wet dreams but a fact.
I'm using Windows 7 on my Sony Vaio Z21MN/B and it is slow. Whenever I'm doing two things at a time, it is lagging. When I move windows, its often slow and you have to stop working for a second or so. I am wondering whether the graphic drivers could be the reason for this.
I'm currently using the graphic drivers version 8.15.11.8684 which is the current driver on the sony homepage.
I'm wondering whether there are newer drivers and where I could get them from?
I was just wondering if anyone experienced a battery increase after down-grading their Vaio Z from Vista/Win7 to XP? If so, by how much?
I'm currently holding a Z710dd (canadian vaio) with a standard battery with windows 7 installed. I previously had a netbook that lost a good hour and half from Windows XP to Windows 7. Even after disabling a lot of the windows aero mumbo-jumbo and themes
I recently purchased a Vaio VGN-SR390 with the "9 hour" battery. I understand you never get that. But what I think is odd, is that no matter what settings I change, including WiFi on/off, it *always* says 3:55 to 4:00remaining with 100% charge. (I haven't actually timed it on the clock, though.)
Questions:
1) Is this what other SR owners are getting? about 4 hours...no matter what
2) How do I make sure bluetooth is off (haven't been able to figure that one out)
3) Should I see the battery life increase with reduced display brightness, Wifi off, etc?
I just ordered a Vaio TZ2500 Premium with the dual drives. It's intended to replace a MacBook Air. While I like the Air a lot, I just can't get used to its big footprint and short battery life. My school's library is pretty old and wasn't really built to accommodate lots of laptops, and often it gets really difficult to find an outlet. I was wondering, what kind of battery life should I expect from the TZ SSD+HD with standard battery?
My usage is very light. Most of the time I'm just looking at PDF's, maybe running some light stuff in Matlab, and Office and Excel 2003.
My other question is, has anyone tried Windows 7, and if so, do all the drivers work correctly?
i saw that there are 3 available processors on sony z series.
1 - Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor P8700 (2.53GHz) 2 - Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor P8800 (2.66GHz) 3 - Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor P9700 (2.80GHz)
the 3 processors will give me enough power, but i travel a lot, and i care a lot about the batter life, so which one is better for the battery life on z series?
hardware configuration to get the longest possible battery life?
I ordered a VAIO Z series with i7 620M chip thinking that it was a Quad core Intel chip. I discovered this morning that is a Dual Core chip. At first I was bummed and was thinking of calling SonyStyle this morning to see if I could change my order altogether.
After researching a bit more....this chip apparently has performance close to quad core chips, (and in some tests it is faster), with much less drain on the battery life.
As I placed my order I asked about the battery life with the large capacity battery option. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the life expectancy with this configuration is approximately 8 hours! So, I have ordered the laptop of my dreams...a high end performer with great battery life.
I am trying to decide if the P8400 is worth the money in terms of battery life. The P8400 uses 25w as opposed to the T5800 that uses 35w. So a 10w difference. But as far as voltage range, the P goes up to 1.250v
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I am looking to buy an SR. But anybody who has any data or experience in comparing the two please chip in.
I will also use RMclock and want to be able to under-volt the CPU. which on the two is more compatible with rmclock?
I have a 4 year old vaio vgn-sz110b with windows xp home.
My battery wear indicator according to mobilemeter is 11% wear.
With windows xp I get 2:30 -3 hours of battery life.
I decided to bite the bullet and finnaly get windows 7 pro.
I created a seperate partition for windows 7 so I can dual boot windows xp/7.
After installing a fresh copy of windows 7 and most of the essential sony programs I decided to test out the battery performance and silly me, I really thought windows 7 would improve the battery performance but the results were absolutely disgusting.
With my fully charged laptop, I unplugged it and watched a movie to see how fast the battery would drain. Normally on my XP OS I would get 2:30 hours of watchtime. When the movie started I looked at the clock and it said 1:20 pm and I took a mental note of that. Shortly after the film the battery baloon popped up saying that the battery had reached critical level. I looked at the time and it said 1:40, I laughed thinking it ws just a mistake. Then in less than 3 minutes my laptop went into sleep mode!.............
tell me the real world battery life of the Sony Vaio Z such as performance vs stamina mode for the Core i7? or continuous internet surfing or continuous movie watching
I used to get 4-5 hours under Windows Vista. Now using Windows 7 Ultimate Edition and I'm lucky if I get 2-3 hours. The Sony site has no Windows 7 drivers for the SR190.
I am considering the two following models: SR290 and Z540. My question relates to the overall build quality of these models as well as battery life with the extended battery.
Basically Im deciding between these 2 and a lenovo. The lenovo is heavier than both, is well made, and has ridiculous battery life. Just curious as to how the sony's stand up over time.
I've had eye on Z Series for couple days, but there exists a mystery I couldn't figure it out.
I've searched this forum and the net, still no answers.
On the sony's official USA website (www.sony.com)
Sony claims VGN-Z790 CTO has upto 7.5 hours of standard battery life.
However, other preconfigured Z Series laptop such as VGN-Z790DND, VGN-Z798Y/X, VGN-790DLX, VGN-790DKX, VGN-Z790DMR, and/or VGN-720D/B has upto 6 hours of standard battery life. It's mystery I was unable to figure out.
what's difference between Z790 and Z720? (I mean fundamental differences like circuitry design or expansion limitations such as maximum ram support and so. Couldn't figure this out... probably one of those model number decryption wizard would know it.)
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.
Vaio Z battery life tests
Vaio Z reviewers getting 9hr battery life!
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.
I am looking for real world feedback for the 6 cell battery on the XPS 16. This would be mainly word processing and Internet surfing, with the screen at about 1/2 brightness
I'm new to OS X, got my MacBook the other day, and I can hands down say it's my favorite OS I've dealt with. It's so much simpler and just plain awesome. Okay, I'll ask my question before I get carried away...
So, I did some searching on Google after I noticed that my battery likes to hang around 99%. Apparently this is common. My question is, is this a BAD thing? When I see 99% I'm picturing that the computer is constantly pushing power into the battery so it can reach 100%. I mean, isn't that how fires start?
Simply put, is my MacBook trying to charge the battery consistently when it is not at 100%?
every time I'm running my uMBP from battery, I'm constantly checking the amount of time I have left and trying to figure ways to increase that time. Yes, CONSTANTLY. Whenever I can, I'm using the a/c adapter.
Even though I may see 6-7 hours left, I'm still not satisfied.
And just about every time I am running the battery, I'll open up Coconut Battery to make sure I still have a 100% charge hold left....even though my umbp is 7 weeks old with only 4 cycles...
1 – Keyboard. When I type cursor seems to jump around a lot. I would be typing and suddenly the cursor is in the middle of the previous sentence and it’s a mess. Is that something common, is that me or is that something I need to call Dell?
2 – Battery life is extremely short. I hear of such thing as deactivating your video card ( I have GeForce 8600 GT) and that supposedly helps you with the battery life. Does this laptop offer such opportunity?
Why is the Studio XPS 13 so terrible on battery life? ~2.5 hours on power saving mode, 1 on high-performance. I believe the Sony Z rates around 3-5 hours on power saving, as does the Latitude 6400. Is it normal to have this low of a battery life for a 13.3"?
What is draining all the power? How does the Z pull 4-5 hours on its battery life?
I don't want to shell out for a 9-cell and also have to deal with the added weight... but this is ridiculous.
Also, are there any new deals for the 9-cell batteries?
Here a bit of summary of how to enable some advance power plan settings, the highlights are disabling the core parking override and max % of unparked cores.
-Windows by defaults keeps at least one logical core active per physical processor core. With the nehalem architecture parked cores consume almost no power. -Also keep in mind if you set max unparked cores to 50% it may still activate all cores because 50% of 8 hyperthreaded cores is 4. -You can use resource monitor to see if cores are parking -once you've done the registry tweaks below you should have some extra options in your advanced power plan settings -Setting you power plan back to defaults nulls you the changes to it is harmless and reversable if you are careful -If you are not comfortable making registry changes don't do this as you can really screw your computer up, if you mess up the wrong things in your registry
Open Regedit (type regedit into the startmenu search box)
Expand location to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPowerPowerSettings54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00
In order to enable some advanced power plan settings you will have to rename the REG_DWORD "Attributes" to "_Attributes". This one it own does not change how your computer runs, it simply adds an extra option into your advanced settings for each power plan
Here are the relevant registry keys: 0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583 lets you set the minimum number of unparked cores (I set this to 25% for power saver)
3b04d4fd-1cc7-4f23-ab1c-d1337819c4bb turns on additional processor throttle states, caution this throttled my laptop to the point that it was almost unusable you can change the attribute to _attribute but leave the power plan setting disabled.
447235c7-6a8d-4cc0-8e24-9eaf70b96e2b Sets the processor power state when parked, I think the default is ok
5d76a2ca-e8c0-402f-a133-2158492d58ad Option to Disable processor idle states, not really relevant on a laptop
a55612aa-f624-42c6-a443-7397d064c04f Processor core parking override, this one is key, it you don't disable this in your power plan settings you will only park "virtual" cores
ea062031-0e34-4ff1-9b6d-eb1059334028 Maximum number of unparked cores, this is useful to put your computer into "dual core mode" in power saver if you set this to 25% or 50%
I have a e6400 with SSD, a P series processor, LED screen and 9 cell battery. On the balanced mode, it is at 94% and 2h32m left. That sounds REALLY low to me. I have WiFi on, brightness up, etc. but still sounds extremely low.
i like having my m1530 on my lap (unplugged) in the living room while i watch tv/babysit so far i can only make it last 2 hours at the most(surfing the web,messengers) with the brightness 30% and powersaver mode.
well i was reading on the thread on how to underclock your cpu...theres a problem with that:
-numero first im too lazy (hurts my head when i try to understand the thread,hence the "[ADVANCE]" on the title ^^")
-numero dos having a t5450 on power saver mode (50% max perfomance) is slow enough... so i tried to look for a better solution and found this...
[url]
i think its great...my battery up to 2 hours and 20-ish minutes.
Anyone running Win 7 RTM and noticing lower battery life? My 6 cell can barely push 2 hours, though its missing about 30% of its capacity due to wear. Its about 18 months old with a lot of charge and discharging. I do like Win 7, the laptop is running very snappy with it.