Battery issue after upgrade

[dtw56]

The battery performance on the N800 has decreased significantly after the recent upgrade. Could this be related to the upgrade or is it the battery? Has anyone else noticed a change after upgrading?

Thanks,
Doug

[jay8378]

i dont have much experience b4 the upgrade but i locked the screen and keys last night and came back to a dead battery? there was no programs running that i know of allthough i did not check top. im not really sure what did it. it is the first time it happened. kinda anoying cause i wanted to use it after work. guess ill be shutting down from now on. :confused: b4 i reflashed i was getting problems with dbus hogging 14% of my cpu constantly in top

[jnack95]

I have noticed that if I turn my n800 off with full battery power and then turn it back on, I lose two bars. If I do it again, the battery is dead (or real close). So I just don't turn it off anymore. If I leave it on, I have good battery performance. Not sure what is going on here. This didn't happen in the previous firmware.

[luketoh]

works much better for me. i put it to offline mode before locking the screen and keys.

did you upgrade the firmware AND restore from backup? maybe some of the stuff from the backup is causing this. also, i had problems with canola before where it would eat up CPU cycles trying to scan my SD card, until i set it to scan ONLY a specific directory instead of the whole card.

[Rider]

Actually my battery lasts much longer with the new OS than with the older version. I'm very happy about it.

Anyway: install a CPU monitor or do a "top" to see if some of your installed apps do use up CPU.

[jay8378]

I've been having trouble finding a good system monitor/task manager. Can anyone recommend a good one?

[luketoh]

Try Osso-Statusbar-CPU

[iball]

I've not noticed any battery issues good or bad in the new firmware.
I still get a lot of battery life, even more so since I edited the mce.ini file to use softpoweroff for powerbutton-longpress instead of poweroff.
I never turn my N800 completely off. When traveling I put it in offline mode and then softpoweroff. It can pretty much stay in that state for days on a full charge.

[Karel Jansens]

I've not noticed any battery issues good or bad in the new firmware.
I still get a lot of battery life, even more so since I edited the mce.ini file to use softpoweroff for powerbutton-longpress instead of poweroff.
I never turn my N800 completely off. When traveling I put it in offline mode and then softpoweroff. It can pretty much stay in that state for days on a full charge.

But wasn't the "new" and "improved" firmware "upgrade" supposed to ameliorate battery life and power management?

[Pushwall]

Before the upgrade I was able to leave my N800 on with a connection open while not using it for quite a long time and the battery wouldn't drain for days. Now if I do this the battery is all the way down just overnight. If I put it in offline mode the battery is fine and seems to last longer than before without charging. So for me the most important thing for a long-lasting battery charge is to remember to put my N800 in offline mode when I'm not using it. Too bad there's no setting to have it automatically go in offline mode after a set period of non-use.

[jay8378]

Try Osso-Statusbar-CPU

works great thank you. :)

[Garage Battle]

i have been having this problem also.

leave tablet on, fully charge around midnight

use it for a little wlan, a little tethering, battery low indicator at 7pm that day.

it NEVER used to do this.

thoughts?

[tabletfan]

One thing I noticed after every upgrade is there is an hidden alarm that is enabled for early morning. This will drain your battery when the machine wakes up in the early morning. Run this command to check for hidden alarms:

/mnt/initfs/usr/bin/retutime -a

[Milhouse]

Oh man, the battery status indicator is truly hopeless... in the last few minutes I've been listening to FM radion on my 4.2007 device with 3 battery bars left. Via an ssh session (which I'd had open for about 3 hours over WiFi) I more'd the first ten lines of a text file and instantly the "Battery low" warning sounded and I'm now staring at 0 bars left and almost constant "Battery low" warnings (every minute or so).

I don't know if the ssh activity had anything to do with the sudden depletion of battery capacity but really, it can't get much worse than this. The accuracy of the remaining power is woeful and such a vital monitoring feature is in danger of becoming yet another gimmick on this platform. :(

[Garage Battle]

One thing I noticed after every upgrade is there is an hidden alarm that is enabled for early morning. This will drain your battery when the machine wakes up in the early morning. Run this command to check for hidden alarms:

/mnt/initfs/usr/bin/retutime -a

where do i enter that command?

[jay8378]

where do i enter that command?

You need osso-xterm package

osso-xterm-advanced (http://maemo.org/downloads/product/osso-xterm-advanced)

or basic

osso-xterm (http://maemo.org/downloads/product/osso-xterm)

Although i entered this command and it said "not found" on my device. I didn't investigate as i don't really have battery problems.

[Milhouse]

where do i enter that command?

In xterm, and you must enter it as root.

Execute the command


/mnt/initfs/usr/bin/retutime -A ''


to disable any alarms (where '' is two apostrophes, and again you must be root).

[Garage Battle]

"you must be root to access CALRTC config block was not found or invalid
Alarm off"

[jay8378]

"you must be root to access CALRTC config block was not found or invalid
Alarm off"
Ok so you need the becomeroot package as well
HowTo_EASILY_BecomeRoot (http://maemo.org/community/wiki/HowTo_EASILY_BecomeRoot)
careful tho root is dangerous
ya i wasnt root the first time i tried it. works good thanks

[Milhouse]

"you must be root to access CALRTC config block was not found or invalid
Alarm off"

You're running the command as the unpriviliged user, however even though you get the error/warning message (which is why you should run it as root to avoid that message) the response is correct/accurate - you have no alarms set.

[Garage Battle]

Ok so you need the becomeroot package as well
HowTo_EASILY_BecomeRoot (http://maemo.org/community/wiki/HowTo_EASILY_BecomeRoot)
careful tho root is dangerous
ya i wasnt root the first time i tried it. works good thanks

figured it out


says 'Alarm off'

so why the battery drain then?

also, it says at the battery indicator '7 days idle - 2 hours use'

[Garage Battle]

its been 10 hours since it said 7days idle, and its dead. im really getting worried here.

[Abel]

I bought the Nokia N800 on 16th of July and immediatly upgraded the OS. These days I had twice a powerproblem:

Symptoms:
1) not able to restart .
2) hot (not warm) battery while loading.

Solution: shortly remove battery and than restart.

:eek:

Abel.

[Rocketman]

Oh man, the battery status indicator is truly hopeless... in the last few minutes I've been listening to FM radion on my 4.2007 device with 3 battery bars left. Via an ssh session (which I'd had open for about 3 hours over WiFi) I more'd the first ten lines of a text file and instantly the "Battery low" warning sounded and I'm now staring at 0 bars left and almost constant "Battery low" warnings (every minute or so).

I don't know if the ssh activity had anything to do with the sudden depletion of battery capacity but really, it can't get much worse than this. The accuracy of the remaining power is woeful and such a vital monitoring feature is in danger of becoming yet another gimmick on this platform. :(

Active use of wifi really eats power. When you turn yet another chip on in the device, the additional current draw is going to cause the battery voltage to sag and read as a low battery even when it still has some life left in it. Your typical battery meter is simply a digital multimeter sampling the voltage of the battery. Different battery types are going to have different use curves, but if you draw current from a battery at a high rate you are going to get many few amp-hours of capacity out of the battery than if you were drawing current at a low rate. Quite simply, turning a lot of dohickies on at the same time is going to result in very poor battery life. Try to keep the backlight low and turn off bluetooth and wifi when you are not using them and you will get MUCH better battery life.

[RioT]

Did anyone use this command to browse as root in file manager?

cd /home/user/MyDocs
ln -s / System

Also http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?p=66973&posted=1#post66973

[Garage Battle]

Did anyone use this command to browse as root in file manager?

cd /home/user/MyDocs
ln -s / System



why, what does that do?

[Garage Battle]

i left my tablet on the charger 9 hours ago, and the charger indicator on the screen (on the desktop) says its still charging.

how is that possible?

[Garage Battle]

Active use of wifi really eats power. When you turn yet another chip on in the device, the additional current draw is going to cause the battery voltage to sag and read as a low battery even when it still has some life left in it. Your typical battery meter is simply a digital multimeter sampling the voltage of the battery. Different battery types are going to have different use curves, but if you draw current from a battery at a high rate you are going to get many few amp-hours of capacity out of the battery than if you were drawing current at a low rate. Quite simply, turning a lot of dohickies on at the same time is going to result in very poor battery life. Try to keep the backlight low and turn off bluetooth and wifi when you are not using them and you will get MUCH better battery life.

no offense, but these things normally go like 3-4 days without a charge with just light usage.

[Garage Battle]

just randomly checked my processes, says i have 86% of my processes being used:

OMAP mCSPI/0
maemo_af_desktop
dbus-daemon
xomap
icd
udhcpc
osso-connectivity


are at the top

when i start the browser it pegs 100%, then levels off to 72% and holds there. that normal?

killing my wifi connection drops cpu usage to 6%. is this possible something related to using a wifi connection with WPA? going out for more testing.

[Garage Battle]

went out testing today, here is what i found:

tether to cell phone: 11% cpu usage at idle
open wireless network in my complex: 11% cpu usage at idle
my home dlink F5D7230-4 WPA secure router: 80% cpu usage at idle

so thats whats killing it. im gonna try my wep router tonight and see if it helps.

while connected to the WPA network the tablet is constantly transferring data. its been 5:30seconds and its already transfered 3mb of data. no clue wtf is going on.

[Alvin]

wow - very strange!

yesterday I removed a corrupt SD card from my N800 and thought that had stopped my bad battery life.

but! I had also bought a new router and set it up as WEP. Maybe my old one was WPA!

[Garage Battle]

the tablet seems equally unhappy with the router with WPA off. i am beginning to wonder if its a router issue, it may not like the one its dealing with. if you are having the battery life issue, post up your router brand and model.

[Garage Battle]

switching the router to "access point mode" fixed the problem.

my wifi router is hooked into my linksys router, and it may have been some firewall BS or something who knows.

anyways seems happy so far, WPA is on, Access Point Mode is on.

[Milhouse]

I think I read somewhere that Ad Hoc WiFi mode is extremely battery intensive - something about the radio not being able to sleep (and thus chewing up the battery). In infrastructure (access point) mode the radio can sleep as the access point will send out regular beacons to maintain the connection but allowing the client to sleep between intervals, and this behaviour isn't possible in ad-hoc mode so the 770/N800 WiFi radio is going full blast all the time whether it's got data to transmit/receive, or not.

[Alvin]

update from me:

My problem was definitely the bad SD card. With the card out my idle CPU was low. With a bad card in the idle CPU was 80% and above. I am guessing that this would drain the battery overnight.

My SD cards are fixed now it seems and the battery issue is gone also.

I like my N800 again!

[Milhouse]

update from me:

My problem was definitely the bad SD card. With the card out my idle CPU was low. With a bad card in the idle CPU was 80% and above. I am guessing that this would drain the battery overnight.

My SD cards are fixed now it seems and the battery issue is gone also.

I like my N800 again!

Sounds like you had metalayer-crawler going nuts due to filesystem corruption on your SD cards.

[Alvin]

Sounds like you had metalayer-crawler going nuts due to filesystem corruption on your SD cards.

yessir. I remember seeing something-crawler in the cpu hogs list.

[Dom Queron]

Something about load_applet_run is fishy.

I noticed that after installing and activating it on my n800 (latest firmware, running off mmc), that my battery would die in less than two hour standby with nothing running if the machine wasn't used.

When not allowing the device to go into standby, battery life was normal.

Removing load_applet_run fixed this for me.

[jay8378]

Something about load_applet_run is fishy.

I noticed that after installing and activating it on my n800 (latest firmware, running off mmc), that my battery would die in less than two hour standby with nothing running if the machine wasn't used.

When not allowing the device to go into standby, battery life was normal.

Removing load_applet_run fixed this for me.

In osso cpu monitor i notice when i unlock my keys there is something eating up nearly 100% cpu cycles but i cant figure out what is doing it because it stops as soon as i unlock it

[zeez]

In osso cpu monitor i notice when i unlock my keys there is something eating up nearly 100% cpu cycles but i cant figure out what is doing it because it stops as soon as i unlock it

Same here...

What is "OMAP McSPI/0" by the way ? It seems to consume lot's of CPU time.

[jay8378]

Same here...

What is "OMAP McSPI/0" by the way ? It seems to consume lot's of CPU time.
I found the source for the header. It's prolly a driver for the omap 2430 processor
Here's (http://www.kernel-api.org/docs/online/2.6.17/d2/d73/mcspi_8h-source.html) a link to the source i found. I'm not really sure what it is though. Maybe someone with more knowledge could shed some light on it. I seen a "turbo_mode" function in the source. Something to do with the clock of the processor maybe. Just a shot in the dark :P
P.S. Looks like it also might be just a patch.

How did you find this? I don't recall seeing it in the osso-cpu task manager

[zeez]

I just had this little script running for a day and notices that "OMAP McSPI/0" takes a lot of cpu time...


import os
import sys
import time
import commands


while(True):
time.sleep(20)
res = commands.getoutput('top -b -n 1')
lines = res.split('\n')
for i in range(len(lines)):
if ("COMMAND" in lines[i]):
logfile = open('cpu.log', 'a')
logfile.write('\n')
logfile.write('---------------------------------->\n')
logfile.write('\n')
logfile.write(lines[i+1] + '\n')
logfile.write(lines[i+2] + '\n')
logfile.close()

[jay8378]

I just had this little script running for a day and notices that "OMAP McSPI/0" takes a lot of cpu time...


import os
import sys
import time
import commands


while(True):
time.sleep(20)
res = commands.getoutput('top -b -n 1')
lines = res.split('\n')
for i in range(len(lines)):
if ("COMMAND" in lines[i]):
logfile = open('cpu.log', 'a')
logfile.write('\n')
logfile.write('---------------------------------->\n')
logfile.write('\n')
logfile.write(lines[i+1] + '\n')
logfile.write(lines[i+2] + '\n')
logfile.close()


Very nice :)

[TA-t3]

I've had two cases lately where my N800 was dead in the morning because the battery ran out. This is unfortunate because it reduces the battery capacity. Fortunately though it's not disastrous like when my PDAs run out of battery, as nothing is lost (the PDAs are basically scratched). I'm not sure of the cause though. But I noticed that the first time load-applet-run indicated CPU usage in the evening, unfortunately I hadn't yet learned that it was a CPU bar I was watching. Don't know what was running. What I've done since the second incident is:
a) I disabled the meta crawler. I can't see that I need it for anything, and I haven't seen any side effects of disabling it either.
b) Every evening I look at load-applet-run to verify that the CPU bar is all clear, if it's not completely white I check what's running, if I can't figure it out I'll reboot. Anyway I haven't had another incident yet after a). That doesn't mean the metacrawler is to blame though, it could be coincidence. However, I didn't have any such unexplained battery drainage overnight in the previous firmware versions. Could still be a coincidence though.

Unfortunately, after those two battery discharges the capacity has definitely got a dent, this has also been the case with every other lithium-powered device I own where the battery was fully discharged. Avoid discharging a lithium battery at all costs, I wouldn't even do the initial discharge-and-charge cycle so often recommended to new users.

[Milhouse]

Interesting news article on the Register: Better gadget battery-level readouts in pipeline (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/04/battery_level_monitor_tech_improvements/).

[TA-t3]

The article made sense. I'm eagerly awaiting, er, the future!

[ImDisaster]

Mine has been sucking down the batteries the last few days...I haven't upgraded the firmware but did fight to get Canola installed (ultimately gave up) and played with a couple other media players...including Rhapsody music service.

The only WIFI app that runs continuously is the weather app.

Being connected to the local network, using WEP, really seems to shorten the life.

I've had a couple of weird occurrences. When left on the charger, overnight, I've opened it to find the screen on (after locking it, after connecting to power.) When I turned it on it said it only had 2 hours of life. Turn off WIFI and it claims 7 hours.

Having an internet tablet that can't stay connected to the internet without severe battery drain kind of defeats the purpose.

An update:

Took it off the charger and it reported 2 hours battery life.

Disconnected from WIFI and it changed to 7 hours.

Reconnected to the WIFI network, but did not start the browser and it still reports 7 hours life.

Started MicroB browser and it bounced down to 4 hours but rebounded back to 6....then 7.

Not sure what process causes the intense CPU cycling...but it is OK for now.

I'll also have to check if logging on and off the WIFI network works to "fix" the problem.

[TA-t3]

I have discovered a problem with a particular wi-fi router only: When connected to this one my N800 sucks battery like there's no tomorrow. It _only_ happens with this router (which is one I own), it's never happened with any other access point anywhere. It took a while before I realised what's happening. Presumably the router somehow prevents my N800 from going into wi-fi sleep mode or something.

I don't have the exact details of this router (it's not located here), but it's a SiS chipset based one. I'll look for firmware upgrades for it and do some more testing if so.

[pdathekid]

my battery life is dieing quick aswell

i didnt have any problems till i installed python and mediacenter with uktube (which crashes everytimei try to use it) i believe

could that be the cause of my battery drain?

im a complete newb so all that coding stuff is jibberish to me

[TA-t3]

Well, since I disabled the metacrawler (see earlier posting), I haven't had any battery issues (save the one with the particular router, posted about it yesterday), so at this stage I'm somewhat inclined to blame the crawler for those times when I was out of battery in the morning.
I'm also wary of installing Canola or any other software which also uses file system crawlers. I don't like file system crawlers and I don't even think they serve any useful purpose.

[pauljohn32]

I notice a big power drain after installing an 8gb SDHC card. With that slot empty, my N800 can go a couple of days without recharging. Simply putting the SDHC cart is seems to cause a massive power run down.

I strongly agree with many posters when they say that high CPU usage does burn up the battery. Running the web browser almost always burns the CPU at 100% these days, especially when reading the active java sites (gmail). This web site uses a lot of CPU, incidentally.

Somtimes I spot "runaway" processes that may be churning away for no good reason. I've been keeping track of applications that are using a lot of CPU and in the terminal I run "top" to see them. Sometimes, there is a program running taking tons of CPU with a vague title like "sh" but no details. I shut down the system all the way, and restarted, that sh program was still there. I reasoned that if the N800 is trying to do "session management" then some bad program that was running before will get launched again. But I don't know if that's what it is doing. I know on Linux lots of systems do have session management. After gaining root, I find that "kill -9 nnn" for the process numbered nnn does kill the mypsterious high CPU using program "sh".

[jay8378]

I have discovered a problem with a particular wi-fi router only: When connected to this one my N800 sucks battery like there's no tomorrow. It _only_ happens with this router (which is one I own), it's never happened with any other access point anywhere. It took a while before I realised what's happening. Presumably the router somehow prevents my N800 from going into wi-fi sleep mode or something.

I don't have the exact details of this router (it's not located here), but it's a SiS chipset based one. I'll look for firmware upgrades for it and do some more testing if so.

was it a belkin router? i have this problem with my friends belkin router. Some times when i connect to it my cpu usage jumps to 100% the task that is using it is dbus_message_something i cant remember.

[TA-t3]

It's a Jensen 802.11b wi-fi router with a SiS chipset. I haven't yet checked for firmware upgrades. I don't know what chipsets Belkin use in their routers.

[jay8378]

Ya and im not sure what model he has. Ill check it out next time i'm over there.

[Gadget25]

Hellooo, Well my problem with the battery is that the day after i updated to os2008 i charged it over night took about 7hours to charge and i got the battery full icon, Now today its going on 10hrs and still no icon to say its charged and by now you'd think it is...not sure if i should reflash it if it will make any difference or not.

If i reflash but backup first... all my stuff should come back on , all the apps i installed etc right?

[Mahaloha]

After upgrading to 2008, my battery don't last as long as before :(

[Karel Jansens]

After upgrading to 2008, my battery don't last as long as before :(

How did you upgrade your battery's software?

Aha aha aha aha. :o

[Gadget25]

I just reflashed my os2008 with no backup except for the bookmarks which shouldnt be a problem...so i'll see what happens now..for the days to come, I downloaded off someone file who uploaded to a server...if it happens again i'll try direct from nokia since it seems to be a bit faster with them now..

I'll let you know what happens, it could be like someone stated above that maybe 2008 takes more processing power