Sony VAIO Y Series Notebook Review
Power Consumption and Battery Life
It's no secret that our battery life figures are generally less than those claimed by the PC maker. We've found that most published battery life figures are based around "ideal" conditions, which generally means that the screen is dimly lit, Wi-Fi is switched off and no real intensive tasks are done during the duration of the test. We use Battery Eater Pro, an application that taxes the system for the duration of the test to mimic heavy real-world usage. We had the screen brightness locked at 60%, Wi-Fi switched on and all other applications closed.
Much like the ThinkPad Edge 13", the VAIO Y doesn't live up to the lofty claims by Sony in terms of battery life; it's not even close. Sony claims that you can get up to 8 hours of life from a single standard battery. We got just over 3. Of course, our test represents expected life while you're actually working, but even if we would've left the machine idle for long stretches, we can't imagine that 3 hours ever stretching to 8. It may get 4 or 5 hours if you play your cards right, but 8 seems overly optimistic. Overall, 3 hours of life while working isn't bad for a standard cell in a CULV machine, but Sony's claims make it more difficult accept the 3 hours. We honestly expected to get somewhere close to 8 hours, and as you can see, we were let down in a big way.
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