Battery Life Issue - Hard Drive Spinning

[Nutty_Mike]

As regards to the hard drive continuing to spin, even when the vaio has been turned off, has anyone thought of removing the battery? This would solve the problem by stopping the disk from spinning round, and preventing the battery life from being drained.

I was just wandering whether anyone else had thought of this, and whether there could be any repercussions if I were to remove the battery.

And to combat the problem of all of your settings being lost, would it be possible to keep the Vaio within its cradle, whilst the battery is kept separate?

Please share your thoughts on this, as I'm sure many would be interested in a cure for depleted battery life

[DiabloVaio]

That's a bit impractical to remove the battery everytime and replace it again!
A better idea is that if we could disable the time and date feature from the options. But we need a firmware upgrade for that.

[@4967457401015621]

has anyone tried just leaving the time and date unset? i just wonder if that might stop the clock running.. might be worth a go

[Nutty_Mike]

That's a bit impractical to remove the battery everytime and replace it again!

Yes, i realise that it would be impractical, but it wouldn't take to long to do , yes it is fiddly the first time you take off the battery cover, but it does get easier as time passes.

As regards to

has anyone tried just leaving the time and date unset? i just wonder if that might stop the clock running.. might be worth a go

the hard disk is kept spinning so that the vaio can start up quickly apparently so I'm not sure if that would have any effect unfortunatly......

[@4967457401015621]

why do you think the hard drive spins continually? the hard drive will only spin once every few minutes, what you can hear is probably a transistor. Just thinking off the top of my head though, if you can constantly hear a transistor, there may be a grounding problem instead, which would mean the battery was constantly discharging and would explain the drain.
Just had a listen: I'm sure it's not the hard disk, could be a transistor, but sounds slightly wrong.. i'll have a think

[DiabloVaio]

Yeah you may be right!
Maybe we are all the victims of a stupid engineering mistake!
I really don't like to have battery drain useless transistors in my gadgets!
I'm serious!

[@4967457401015621]

just had another listen.. i was being stupid, i'm sure it's a capacitor. the thing is, once it's charged it should remain charged, not be discharging unless it's discharging to something (presumably the timing circuit). however, by the amount of noise it's making it's a relatively high power cap, which is odd. sony's response that the battery drain is due to timekeeping is a pile of sh1t - my watch battery is about 1/50th of the size of that in the VP and can run a watch, light and sounder for years. i'm beginning to think that they've made a mistake, which leads to a capacitor or similar being grounded and so constantly charging/discharging (the noise you hear), flattening the battery. the ipod (much as i hate to compare the vp to it) has a clock and instant on (quicker than the VP) yet still doesn't suffer the discharge problem to the same extent (i leave my 5gb upstairs and just play to my drums with it, and one charge will be enugh for about 10 hours practise in a week) - i've only had to reset the time on that once.

[MadarbWoT]

bentate,you seem to know much of these electronic terms and all.
could it be that you send an email to sony follow by users signatures or anything explaining the problem as you figure it and letting them know that their "big secret" is exposed?

there has to be somthing that can be done for this...
and personally i dont think that opening the vp and removing/replacing or whatever would be an alternative!


as for the battery removal proposal;it cannot be done as you have to fully drain the battery before removing it[said in the manual and i guess it is so with common logic]

[@4967457401015621]

i've got a fair clue as to what's happening with electronic stuff, so i might send sony an email and see how they respond when i point out that the battery is too big to be drained by pure timekeeping/storing setting. depending on how they respond, i'd then write another email with a more detailed response, and add signatures from other users. this could be a lengthy process, as last time I emailed sony it took 3 or 4 weeks to get a response. what would be useful though would be the original email where sony blamed the battery life on the timekeeping element, and stats on how long people have to leav the battery for it to be flat (rather than just a day or two)

[MadarbWoT]

well if theres anything that you need from us forum users please do ask!

i would support any effort of solving this problem.
i actually find your idea very organised and probably it will have an effect on them.

go get them:smileywink: