z13 Poor Battery Life

[CarlL]

My wife has a Z13 with an OEM Sony battery. It has been set at 50% capacity when at home, because she usually plug it in. She is now going on a trip and I set the battery at 100% charge. Even at 100%, she says the battery runs out at about 2 hours. This is a surprise.

The laptop has a 1TB drive in the dvd slot. Is this what is eating up the battery? Is there any setting that we can use to increase the battery life?

Thx for any info you can provide.

[Ashers]

Make sure she's using it in stamina mode while on battery and the "power plan" is not maximum performance. Speed mode eats up the battery pretty quickly.

Also, have a look at my posts in:
General wear and tear question regarding laptop
I recommend she installs a program like the "batterycare" program I mention, as that will show the wear of her battery and its discharge rate. If the PC has a high discharge rate, you'll need to go to task manager to try to find the processes that are running flat out.

[woodsielord]

Two hours sounds about right in Nvidia mode. As said, put it on stamina, reduce brightness, kill anything you are not using (sound, optical drive, bluetooth, wireless), put the power plan on battery savings, and watch it go for 5 hours easy.

[beaups]

The battery very well could be 50+% worn by now.

[namaiki]

Two hours sounds about right in Nvidia mode. As said, put it on stamina, reduce brightness, kill anything you are not using (sound, optical drive, bluetooth, wireless), put the power plan on battery savings, and watch it go for 5 hours easy.

I've never really been able to get so much out of the battery. My minimum power consumption with use seems to be about 14W while typing up stuff. My battery is about 50 watt hours which gives me a max of about just over 3 hours... :/

[CarlL]

Thanks for the info everyone. I checked that the laptop is in stamina mode when on battery. Wife is a photographer who uses the laptop in the field to store photos and sometimes do a little photoshop work. Since the display is calibrated, she needs to keep screen brightness, etc., the same whether on battery or AC when she does any photoshop stuff. That is probably what limits battery life.

Couldn't check anything more, since wife and laptop are on their way to Europe for a 3 week assignment.