Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

I upgraded the OS on my N800 back when it was releaesd, and since then the battery life has been terrible.

Previously I'd use lock keys and screen, and could easily go a week or more without charge if I didn't use it, perhaps 5 days with very light use.

Now I do the same with Diablo installed, and I'll be lucky if it lasts 24 hours. First time round I put this down to a mistake on my part, leaving Wifi on or something.... but this is now occuring every day.

So now I have the option of either charing every day, or actually turning it on and off (as opposed to just lock keys and screen).

Has anyone had a similar problem with Diablo, and does anyone know if a fix is being planned, or is this something unique to my n800?

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

same here, but with n810...
it could be a bad modest, too, therfore i´ve reflashed and do not use modest anymore... lets see in the next days whats up...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

i am actually having this problem as well, but I thought my battery was just going bad

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

have you all modest (the built-in email client) in use??

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

weird...
I had the same problems you describe ... with chinook ... with diablo it is so much better I almost forgot about meta-crawler and so on... search ! there are lot's of threads with tips for improving battery life...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Mhm... I wonder if the problem I wrote about here has the same cause. I used to think it's because the battery's old... but maybe it's Diablo?

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Have your tablets reverted to being able to make automatic connections after the flash?

This is a killer, especially if you don't realise that your tablet is sitting on the 'net all night long.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

i go to offline mode - it's my way of 'switching off' the tablet. ;)

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

i go to offline mode too but i get less than 24 hours with light use.. is this normal? my n800 came with the latest OS already installed..

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

That's no possible. Last OS (Diablo) is less than a month old and new N800s are not available since before that.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

• Is your internal card corrupted?
• Is your external card corrupted?
• Is metalayer-crawler running away when the device should be idling?
• Is Modest choking out on something and running away when the device should be idling?
• Have you installed any nasty CPU-eating home applets?
• Are there any applications that you leave up that might cause problems?

That mostly covers it.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

I am having the same issues. I upgraded to Diablo last night on a full battery. set up a few things on the system (OMWeather, GPE) and then went to bed. This morning i noticed it had powered down. I did leave it online, but should have still had power after only 6 hours.

Dave

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

My battery life is BETTER with Diablo than OS2007. I went all weekend without charging.
And that is with WiFi, Bluetooth, RSS feeder, and Gmail checker running.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3357

If it's because of Modest vote/comment on the bug.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

WRT Modest - No, I've not even run it (I use webmail isntead).

Have checked Wifi settings aren't set to auto-connect, so if it is, its doing it despite control setup.

I'm glad I'm not the only one, unfortunately its rendering my tablet virtually useless.

I'll run through the other suggestions and see where I get to.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

The browser (and anything else with a timer) also stops dyntick from slowing the tick rate. If I leave a browser window open all night the battery will probably be flat the next day.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

I haven't noticed this to be "killing" my battery. I have gone for almost 3 days with a SSH session logged in (from my linux laptop). Battery works just fine.

I did find that when I was experiementing with getting bluetooth PAN working, that there was a daemon which seems to be chewing through the battery. I dumped that (for now) and now I have pretty good battery life with Diablo.

You may want to try a real version of top to see what is eating your cycles. You can get a real version (with a real PS too) from:
http://www.makikiweb.com/n800/downlo....2.7.armel.deb

I renamed the utilities so as to not clash with the built in ones, so run rtop and rps after installing.

I hope this helps,

Craig...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Nope. I haven't even set it up yet. And my battery life has gone the other way as well.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

i bought my unit 2nd hand so the seller installed diablo on it already.. you think i should reflash? when fully charged, does your tablet show (only) "5 hours when in use" on the battery status?

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

I have a N810 and when fully charged it shows "7 hours when in use".

I think N800 and N810 should have a similar battery charge.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

I was having battery life problem with Chinook. My battery life was fine after I had flashed to Chinook (I could go 5-6 days with light use) but at some point after I had installed and uninstalled a number of packages, my battery life tanked (down to less than one hour of battery life left after 48 hours with same usage pattern as before). I was going through the process of uninstalling one app at a time to see when my battery life went back to normal. I ended up flashing to diablo before I found the culprit:) I figured I would just start afresh with diablo. Now with diablo my battery life is around 3 days. So life hasn't improved much for me. Maybe it is the battery getting old (it is about 17 months old) or maybe there is an app that chews up CPU and I have installed that app again after diablo upgrade.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Same problem here. I installed nothing new and my battery depletes over night. Before diablo it would last all week if not in use. Too bad, as i really dont want to figure out how to go back to os2008 and get everytimg working and yet now its awful

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

to put in a positive note that it's not diablo itself
N800 running stock diablo ,only applets advanced backlight and statusbarclock - run's for daaay's...(wifi off when not needed/no autoconnect and no modest running)
I do close all apps liek browser /games etc... however when not using it...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Make sure wifi auto-connect is off or put the unit into offline mode. Caught me out a couple of times when a full battery didn't last overnight.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Don't leave XTerm or Browser windows open or dyntick won't be able to slow the tick rate.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

I've personally noticed it to be "back to normal" and able to last 2-3 days on a full charge for my usage.

As for my personal usage habits, I usually leave wifi off during the day since I don't have access to the company's wifi. I just usually use it the whole day (roughly 5 hours or so) as an mp3 player while doing work. When I get home, it goes through about 1 hour tops with the wifi on.

Usually lasts me two to three days like this before the battery flats. Back when I had chinook it would only last me a day tops. I even had to keep a charger on my desk at work just in case.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

i could with the older verson of os2008 i could just turn off wifi when i was not using it and pick it up and down during the day and only need to charge it every other day.

with diablo i had to charge it twice a day

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Last night I locked my n810 and then went to dinner. When I got to the restaurant I check the unit and it was "stuck" disconnecting from my home network. I could not change networks or go offline I had to reboot.

There are a number of open bugs that could be contributing to the problem.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

XTerm as well?? I have a habit of leaving an xterm running all the time. I will try closing it every time and see if my battery lasts more than 3 days. Thanks!

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

It seems the real killer was the RSS feed. I've told it not to auto update and I can through a night or two now without charge. No Wifi wasn't auto on, but dunno why RSS killed it.

However its still not quite upto the week or thereabouts that it was, 2 nights is the max at the moment... and usually I get woken at some far to early hour as it winges its out of juice.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

My battery life is the same or possibly better with Diablo.

Those having trouble, suspect that a program or process is stuck in some loop and eating up processor power and preventing it from going into one of the power save modes.

There are several ways to test for this:

1) Install and observe the status-bar load applet

2) From an X-term shell, run "top" and observe the CPU% of the top few processes
("q" quits "top" other commands can be found on the internet, but note that
this is the stripped down "busybox" version of "top")

3) Install and observe "conky" (a discusion found in the "apps" section of ITT).
The problem with conky is that it uses a little processing power itself so will
drain the battery too, but only while you are running it.

Once the resource hogging process is found, come back with one of those postings that says "Program/Process xxx is hogging up 99% of my processor usage", and we can then work from there.

In the meanwhile, keep doing updates, and perhaps the problem will just go away. My Diablo upgrade was fairly problematic. At several times I had things crashing and locking up in loops until I got most of the 3rd party software installed in a stable working order. I still have a few things not working, but at least now the list is short.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Good advice but the screen size makes top almost unusable as the process name if practically off the screen.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

The zoom +/- keys always work...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Indeed, makes it a whole lot better :)

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

On my tablet it seems modest is hogging the CPU at 96% constantly :(

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

This will catch processes that are running continuously and eating up CPU. It will not catch processes that come in periodically, eat up lots of CPU and go away. Whenever I have run top, I see CPU utilization around 3%-4% and no process seems to be hogging CPU, yet my battery dies in 3 days. How would one catch a transient periodic process?

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Yeah it does something timer related and I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember or find a link to the bug/explanation. Can anyone remember what it was? I seem to remember it was possible to switch this behaviour off by setting/unsetting some envvar or similar :S

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

modest does not even work for me for google mail (maybe it will work when I am not behind a firewall). So that is one less battery hog for me :D

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

what i found myself doing after reading this thread was to shut down all of my desktop applets, except homecpuspeed. then i observe.

its will drop to about 164 mips. then rise again to 397 mips. then it may drop again to 164, and rise again. but sometimes it will basically lock at 397.

at the same time i have load-applet in the statusbar. when homecpuspeed locks at 397, i will see a load-applet pulse between 1 and 2 blocks. and this is just me sitting there looking at the desktop.

now, if i run something like say notes, load-applet will show a steady low cpu while notes is just sitting there doing nothing.

if i then close down notes, homecpuspeed will show 397 for a while, then 164, and then go back up to 397 and sit there, or pulse between 397 and 164. most likely it will just go to 397 and sit there...

something is eating away in there, but all i can find that is doing something is hildon-desktop...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Well, you're running two applets that graphically display stuff to watch load and CPU; I'd try disabling those and monitoring it with a script that loops, dumping data to a file (so as not even to incur CPU load for network traffic ala ssh) and see if it does settle. Keep in mind that the waking up to run the applets might occur before it samples the CPU... it could be 164 99% of the time. (Which of course applies to any method of measuring it...)