Notebook Battery Life

[DavidMac]

I have just purchased a Vaio FS115E as I was pleased with the spec in the advert but I do notice the battery only lasts for about 90minutes whereas the description says it should last for about 3 hours. Is this normal? Do you know if you can purchase a battery that lasts longer? Does anyone know how to display the remaining time and not just the percentage of battery life left?

Thanks for any comments.

Dave

[seb21__]

Max. 2 hours is possible.

[DavidMac]

I have only managed about 1.5 hours which is not as advertised.
It is a new Vaio laptop and I did make my back up disks (CD as I did not have any DVDs at the time) but I trust this make is reliable enought not to have to use. I am new to PCs as I am used to working on an AppleMac but apart from battery seems good.

[chris_lewis]

Also bear in mind your battery is new, make sure the battery is flat before you recharge as this will cycle the cells and increase performance of the battery as a whole, if you do this you will see an improvement it just takes a little while.

C

[TygerTyger]

Battery usage depends on what you are doing. Processor intensive stuff, using the DVD/CD drive, using the internet, sound, having the screen at full brightness etc all drops the battery life considerably. Sony, like all other manufacturers as far as I'm aware, state the maximum possible time you can get out of the battery, usually measured when idle. It is basically a trick and regularly has someone on the forum wondering why their battery life is nothing like it was supposed to be, but it's another one of those non-too-sweet industry practices.

[kee-lo_]

Yeah doing as Chris described is a good method of getting the battery to work better.

But as TT pointed out, the settings have to be matching the process you're doing.

Making the CD backup is perfectly fine.