Boot Times
I was expecting to see some really good standby/hibernate/boot times from the VAIO P because of is quick SSD, but I must say that I am somewhat let down by the hibernation performance.
| In (shutdown) | Out (startup) | |
| Startup/shutdown | 34 seconds | 44 seconds |
| Hibernate | 42 seconds | 1:10 |
| Sleep (standby) | 7 seconds | 2 seconds |
At least Vista is very good at handling sleep, so good in fact, that it makes the 20 second booting ‘Instant Mode’ mostly obsolete. Unfortunately, if you opt for any other option boot option, you see a relatively huge increase in the time it takes on both ends. I would image that boot up is actually pretty fast, but I don’t have another Vista machine to compare it to, and I don’t feel that most power users shut their computers all the way down, most of the time. Hibernate seems to be the worst. In my opinion, a hibernate that takes more time than shutdown, isn’t worth using.
Battery Life
Unfortunately, the VAIO P only has a 2-cell, 16Wh, 2100mAh battery, so if you need long battery life, you’ll either have to bring a few spares, pick up an extended, or look to a different computer. I did a pretty darn honest test of the VAIO P by using it for as long as it would run, doing things that one would normally use the computer for. My session included constant WiFi connectivity, Bluetooth on (though not being used), screen brightness at 50%. I used Chrome to browse the web and played back several flash videos. In the end, the VAIO P’s small battery lasted for around 2 hours and 48 minutes.
Sony offers a double capacity 4-cell battery which has exactly double the specs of the standard battery: 32Wh, 4200mAh, and should double the runtime as well, giving you a real life usage of 5 hours and 36 minutes. Jenn over at Pocketables has a very good comparison of the standard and extended VAIO P batteries. If you love the VAIO P, but can’t live with only around 2.5 hours of real-time use, picking up an extended battery for $129 MSRP is a cheap way to get your VAIO P to run for 8 hours and 24 minutes (combining the real life runtimes of the standard and extended batteries). Of course that would mean carrying around an additional, albeit small, battery, but it will still reduce the ultra mobile factor of the VAIO P’s ultra mobile PC acronym.
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this little gallery of numbers and graphs. Stay tuned for the upcoming extended software impression section of our VAIO P review, and additional coverage after that.
Performance – Sony VAIO P http://www.umpcportal.com/?p=6399
Let’s hope Windows Seven will perform better with the boot and hibernate times…
By the way, the out of hibernation time is *really* long. Basically the hibernation process of Windows dumps the content of the RAM in a file.
I guess we could compute the time it takes from the SSD performance ; for instance to go into hibernation: 2GB RAM into one big file on the SSD (sequential write) –> 2048MB / 50.96MB/s = 40.2s
Which fits perfectly with the 42 seconds stated ; a bit more than a second to launch the hibernating process, 40 seconds to dump the ram, and the rest of the time to shutdown the computer.
But now what’s going on with going out of hibernation??? If we do the same calculus: read one big 2GB file (sequential read) on the SSD into RAM –> 2048MB / 69.41MB/s = 29.5s
So it should take less than 30 seconds to read the file. Let’s add 5 seconds for the BIOS process, and 5 more for Windows to find the file and get ready to work after loading it in RAM, we end up with 40 seconds. Not 1 minute and 10 seconds, not 70 seconds. That’s basically twice the time it should take!!!
I guess that’s something you should dig into. There’s a problem here…
Plus, as you rightfully said: “In my opinion, a hibernate that takes more time than shutdown, isn’t worth using.” I totally agree.
I note from Pocketables that although you can tune the system to get rid of most video playback issues, no one has got the machine to play anything usably with iTunes, which is a real shame. It looks like a pretty low level driver issue. http://forum.pocketables.net/forumdisplay.php?f=85
for unrecognised graphics vista automatically awards 5.9. Don’t ask why because I don’t know, nor do I know why the gfx still isn’t recognised, but that is why the score is so high.
Thanks I didn’t know that, I’ll update the post when I have a chance.