WTF Sony! Your software is hidden when it's useful!?

[fohfoh]

Ok, now, after about a full year of owning this laptop, I decided to see what type of junk was still left on my laptop that I had not uninstalled. (Mainly due to driver issues with vista at the time). For the longest fucking time I only had access to "Max performance", "Balanced" and "Vaio Max battery".

I open up the power manager to see what the interface would look like, and find it unlocks an additional 4 set of power options which are far more in depth than the above.

Power Management off: Gives me performance that exceeds that of "Max Performance" I literally had no clue that my laptop could use stuff faster.
Power Saver: Gives me battery life better than Vaio Max battery without compromising performance. Weird... but interesting to know. Allows me to power off hardware I don't need if necessary on a side list)
Vaio Ultimate battery: This is the one that threw me off. This setting gives me MUCH MORE battery life than Vaio Max battery. Vaio Max battery was giving me approx a total of 3.5-4 hours. (I assumed due to the fact my batter is about a year old) But no... Ultimate battery gives me a good 5.5 hours due to the fact it immediately asks me to power off the audio hardware, CD/DVD burner and the LAN hardware. (Wifi still works fine). I feel like I'm on a centrino P4, but to a certain extent, it's perfectly fine when I only want to take notes and have no need for surfing etc. (Perfect option for class)

Great job morons. You make everyone feel retarded for having terrible battery life with C2D and you hide shit like this?

* fohfoh goes to find an exec to punt in the balls

FTR, I still find the other 90% of the programs shitty as fuck. So don't get me wrong. I'm just saying I'm surprised they have a program that works this fucking well and isn't even being used.

[NaRu]

Toshiba has something like that too. My 18" laptop gets about 5 hours on battery when the eco green settings are on.

[fohfoh]

Toshiba has something like that too. My 18" laptop gets about 5 hours on battery when the eco green settings are on.

The thing is, I recall seeing some of these (not all) settings before on earlier vaio laptops too. But in the later generations I never saw the settings again (C2D, but not sure on centrino duo or Centrino dual 2). I had assumed Vaio scrapped that setting/program.

But yes, I've seen settings like that in other laptops. (With the exception of your Toshiba which I assume has a battery the size of a cement block). Lenovo and Acer have their own version that's quite obvious. (Acer being a big pain in the ass because that shitty power management thing loads up on start up as its own window) Toshiba's just sits in the taskbar afaik.

[ilk3000]

Do you know if Dell has that? I use my laptop mostly plugged in, but it could be useful. I killed pretty much all of the startup programs that Dell booted onto my OS, but I don't remember seeing anything power-related. Vista has regular and advanced power settings, but nothing hardware-related.

[Nikaido]

They do this to make non-advanced users think that the only way they would get longer battery life is to buy a new battery. Mine says that it has a battery life of 2 hours but after messing with the power management settings it's now able to get up to 4½-5 hours, as long as I don't do anything that requires a lot of processing power (ie: video encoding). If I'm just surfing the net or typing up a paper it'll last that long, but only if I have the screen brightness low. Although with LCD screens all you need to do is the angle that you look at it and it's brighter.

[fohfoh]

Dell has Dell quickset, but quickset is a POS software. You can't tinker any advanced settings to turn off hardware. (This you must do manually in task manager, but is a hassle) However, disabling things like Blue tooth or LAN/Ethernet ports or DVD/CD drives etc. when you don't need them actually significantly improves batter life. (Mainly Blue tooth since it's on like a 90% of the time your computer is on regardless of whether you're using it).

@Nikaido: To a certain extent your argument makes sense, yet at the practical pov it doesn't make sense. For instance, if you can do that, but your speed suffers, then what makes the average (idiot) consumer think of the laptop vs a netbook? (We're talking idiots who can't figure out how to do much on a computer.) But give them a little less battery life, but processing power that easily squashes netbooks, they're as happy as a roll of toilet paper and think the investment is worth it. (Since technically the reason people buy laptops over netbooks is for the processing power and not long battery life) I think it's more legal in nature that they would weigh lower battery life (against the advertised maximum) against the "uselessness" of a laptop (Retards who go, "My uncle has an Acer and it's awesome! Always buy Acer, never buy Toshiba/Sony/Whoever" without realizing they bought a 700 laptop vs their uncle's 1500 dollar laptop.)

But seriously, this thing had a choice that was useful for both experienced users and retards alike. So maybe they're fucking around to try and get me to buy another battery... idk. But it's still annoying and nice to know it exists. (Even if it's 1 fucking year after I've had the laptop)

[kyanwan]

Wanna know why?

Ultimate battery maxes out your battery life huge - doesn't it?

What $100.00 accessory do you not buy if you have massive battery life?   That's right.  A spare battery.



The IT guy can solve any problem in relation to computers.  The BEST IT people will be able to code themselves out of a job. 

[Viseroid]

A few years back I found out that my laptop had a speaker boost mode. By pressing FN+F10 the speakers would become twice as loud! I looked all throughout the users manual and I never found it out. The first time I turned it on it was on accident and made my headphones sound all staticy, I thought the damn thing was broken xD. This was a Sager 4881.

[fohfoh]

Most times though on a business model notebook like this, a battery is purchased well before the model ships... so yeah.

Dell has some funny features that are built in that aren't in the instruction manual. Though, the keyboard tells about most of them.


EDIT:


By the way, this is the view I get now. The top 3 are the new ones + the bottom "Power Management off" one.

Seriously though, the "Dots" are not even in the correct location, though the power settings work as per the name.