Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

heh, killing hildon-desktop via load-applet makes homecpuspeed pulse between 164 and 397, until right before it plans to turn the screen of automatically. then it settles at 164 for maybe 10 seconds and then the screen dims.

as for using a script to dump to a file, kinda out of my league ;)

still, some of the home*-series applets seems to be able to send the cpu into a spin. seems mostly related to homewifi and hometemp (those are the ones that i have observed the patter with). this will persist even after i unload them.

only thing that really seems to help is killing hildon-desktop...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

hildon-desktop, of course, runs all your applets (which are .sos, more like libraries than stand-alone executables). So maybe it's not unloading them...
(I think I got the filename right; mix of memory and brief google. Check it first.)

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

well the offending applets are python based so im not really sure whats going on.

im guessing they start some kind of timer thats checking different sys files and similar at intervals, but beyond that i got no clue. could be that unloading them fails to stop said timer or something...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

But I think, if you disable all applets, you should be able to get consistently low frequencies. (Maybe only after disabling them all and killing the desktop again...)

But in any case, with the above shell script, you should be able to log stuff to a file with minimal impact, anyway, and without a fixed set of applets; that way you can see if either the load-meter or the CPU-speed applet are being themselves major contributors...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

hmm, homewifi leaves a tick, but thats not surprising. something each 25-30 second or so.

load-applet seems to also have one, but at longer intervals.

homecpu on the other hand seems to not have any...

i dont know whats going on, but i wonder if hildon-desktop have a issue with cleanly unloading applets at times. but that could be highly bothersome to track down...

anyways, thanks for the help.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

I've also found it handy to lock the screen (thus then shutting down the screen) then run "top" from a remote computer vis ssh.

For the long term event logging, I wonder if it is possible to log any changes in power state and/or cpu frequency? This also assumes you run the logger at a very low prioity so the logger itself does not cause these events.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Yup. I too noticed horrible battery life after upgrading to diablo. Thinking of flashing back. But I'll try it for a few more days. I just changed a wifi setting. Hope it helps. Also I've not used modest nor set it up.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Just a comment towards GeneralAntilles. It is nice to see a list of things one could check, still i have a remark:
For me it looks like lots of people have problems with drained battery since the diablo upgrade, the same applies to me, even when all radios are off!
So i wouldn't check on the people's devices if something is screwed up, it is just to obvious that the issue is in the SW. ;)

I will check if this modest is the one to break it, it is anyway for me useless as i want to use GMX IMAP mail and modest has a bug here. :(

------------ clip -------------------
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?
------------ clap -------------------

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

> it is just to obvious that the issue is in the SW.

Actually, I just upgraded to Diablo on my N800 and although I do not have much experience with OS2007 battery life, I believe I am getting very good battery life. Typically 10days, 6 hours (reported) on a full charge with WiFi turned off. In practice, I get about 3 days of use without power-down and maybe 90 minutes use per day with WiFi and max power saving. Seems about normal compared to posts I have seen here. Note that I had a pretty clean system before I did the upgrade. Basically no apps installed but the ones it came with (I just got it 'new').

It *does* look like the poor battery life is related to the upgrade on your system, but probably not OS2008 itself. Hence that list may be useful after all.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

I was having the issue with poor battery life and I did upgrade to diablo recently. lardman pointed out xterm can keep dynticks from slowing down tick rate and I had gotten into a habit of leaving xterm running. I have now been shutting all apps down consistently when I am not using N800 and my battery life seems to be decent. I am getting about 5 days of use out of it with wifi usage for 30-45 minutes a day, media player for 1-2 hours a day and other apps like xterm, notes etc used for roughly half hour each day. This is good enough battery life for me and is in line with what I used to see earlier (before I got into the habit of leaving xterm running :) )

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

khalid, 5 days of that kind of usage is very good. i'm getting around 1-2 days with that kind of usage and i don't leave any apps opened.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

There are some people on ebay, that are buying N800s, flashing with the updates, and selling them.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Perhaps there are. I think you may have accidentally posted in the wrong thread, however? That doesn't seem to have much to do with battery life...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

i barely get a day's worth of battery life, however i use my tablet extensively for note taking, running palm apps, surfing and reading ebooks. i don't even use my notebook at school anymore :p

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

maybe there is a difference between flashing under windows and flashing under linux...
i've flashed under windows and have had a VERY bad battery-time with diablo compared with chinook.
will try to reflash under linux...
sounds not to be logic but it's worth a try

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

you may be on to something here! i flashed mine with windows! please do post your results!

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

this should have basically nothing to say...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

If you have bad battery life, please list all dekstop and statusbar plugins which you are using. Plugins are the most likely reason for bad battery life

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

have had a fresh diablo flash without any plugins or something different from chinook before... GPE Summary and clock as widgets, nothing as statusbar plugin..
basically the same installation as on chinook before.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

While this may be a little off topic (as I dont have diablo on my n800) - but I too had been experiencing crappy battery performance.

Turns out - that while traveling I was exclusively charging via a cigarette charger and NOT the ac unit that came with my tablet.

Back home - to the AC unit - battery life went back to normal.

Thought I'd mention it.... just in case.... ;)

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

It's always possible the Diablo build of even things you used under Chinook has a bug...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

i've noticed one thing too.. i used to charge my n800 (diablo, and i never shut it off) before i go to bed and just leave it charging till morning when i pack up and take it to school.

yesterday i forgot to charge it before i went to bed so i got up extra early to charge it.

it seems the battery life improved with the latter. could it be that after the battery gets fully charged it is slowly getting discharged? or is there some sort of trickle charging?

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

ok, now i've reflashed under linux. installed following programs:
rtcomm update, mplayer, agps-ui, blobby volley 2, skype, germany + alps map, GPE calendar and todo, rootsh.
until now i can't notice any battery drain issues like the last time.
but i've also formatted internal card under chinook, take out external card under chinook, flash, format internal card under diablo, insert external card and format it. lets see if it helps.
btw: agps is amazing: cold-start (never see the sky under diablo before) in my house (no direct view to the sky) in only amazing 8 seconds!! 8, eight... wow...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

I'm experiencing exactly the same battery life problems since Diablo. I've swtiched off meta-crawler etc and now I switch off-line too. I never used to but since Diablo I have to.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

@ lemmy: have you flashed under windows?

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

FWIW, I have had no battery problems. And I flashed under Windows. :o

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

i just wish there was a way to do task/process management without having to go via terminal or some tray applet. thats what i use load applet for mostly, the rise and fall of the indicators are just nice hints for when browser stops responding...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

I have no proof, but I doubt that it makes any difference whether you flash under Linux or Windows. I suspect that the Linux users are typically a little more savy about what is going on with their NIT (since it IS a Linux machine) and took care of or prevented some problems as they went along and forgot that they did it. I certainly fall into that category. (Yes I flashed under Linux, have great battery performance under Diablo, but probably fixed some things along the way and forgot about them). The only tip I can give is to keep checking that you don't have any processes that are stuck in a loop, or any that keep waking the NIT up and running it at full speed every few seconds/minutes/etc. I quit using some "Home-screen" apps that fell into this second category.

Also note that because most of the repositories have changed quit a bit since Diablo first came out, those re-flashing today will get very different results from those flashing back when Diablo was first released once they then update all their software from these repositories. I'm not saying you need to re-flash, but you might need to un-install your extra software and reinstall them so you are sure to get all the latest versions with (more importantly) the latest support libraries they depend on. Before you do this, you probably need to verify that your repository catalogs are up to date, as in the ones that now should be pointing at Diablo instead of Chinook do so. This does not seem to be a trivial process, perhaps I should post my "sources list" file showing what I have figured out so far.

[UPDATE: I just did, you need to take the .txt off the end and put it into /etc/apt/sources.list.d on your NIT. Note this will overwrite your existing catalog list so I'd back it up somewhere. Also I think there is a link to Mozilla that quit working on this list, maybe others. Windows users: Use Wordpad instead of Notepad to view this file.]

About using a non-original charger: I to have been messing around with some 3rd party aftermarket chargers meant for Nokia "N" series phones. The ones I've tried don't have enough current capacity to charge the NIT at a good rate, and in fact if you have your NIT configured to NOT go to sleep when on the charger (as in the screen stays lit etc.) It is possible that your discharge rate can be greater than your charge rate with such a charger.

Note the factory charger is rated for 890ma of current, with my aftermarket one I measured that it can only do about 400ma or so then additionally it overloads and cycles on and off at a repetitive rate, thus reducing the average charge rate even more.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

now i'm getting the problems again...
heat back of the n810 and every night a dead device... and max 1 day of use.
flashing chinook...
edit: i'm very frustrated, because i like agps and the finger/stylus recognition of diablo...
why my n810 have these problems? can anyone help me please to find out? :-(

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

quick question, anyone using taskbarclock (not the big one)?

if i understand it right it may not allow the device to "sleep" correctly if active.

after i turned it of, it seems to give me better standby time. hell, for the first time since i flashed to diablo, im seeing the battery go to full after some sleep time (as its status seems to be calculated based on power drain over a amount of time).

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

i'm just wondering right now why i thought that stylus/finger recognition does not work in chinook... it DOES work...
nope, i wasn't using taskbar-clock

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

For me lot s of user use chinook repository on diablo, and the chinook one contains some packages that you shouldn't install on diablo.

At this time, home applet on diablo available is homecpuspeed, homediskfree, and homememoryfree.

This applet update every 2s when there are in background and do nothing when there are in background or device idle.

So no more battery drain. But don't install python2.5-hildondesktop on diablo it was made for chinook, and don't send some events on chinook ! Like when tablet idle ...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

would that even be possible? i would have figured that any diablo version of said python package would have a higher version then the chinook one.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

It's seems obvious to me that it's Diablo. My battery life is 2 hours max. With Chinook, it lasted forever.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

hmm, i just had a interesting experience.

i used my N800 until the battery started complaining. then i set it for offline and locked the screen. it sat like that for 10 hours or so.

only desktop items running: personal launcher and the default clock, with load applet in the bar.

ones i hit the power button to check up on it tho it powered down on me. so now its sitting here, recharging...

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

I am getting better battery life from diablo on my n800 than with chinook.

I'd done a lot of fiddling with it, breaking the world clock app, so I didn't do any automatic restores, so having taken a file-by-file backup before flashing, I restored my environment manually.

The only thing I haven't set up yet is modest, but I have just the same number of RSS feeds; I also have a sip and google-talk account set up just the same. I have played with wifi power settings and it didn't make much difference.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Know I'm reviving an old thread, but this has been a constant source of low-grade annoyance. I upgraded my N800 to Diablo about a year ago, and my battery life has never been the same. I used to get a week or so between charges with minimal use; now it's 2-3 days. And I am running a very minimal system--less, in fact, than I used in my pre-Diablo days (e.g., I used to use RSS feeds, but no longer). My totally unscientific guess as to the culprit: the mechanism that now automatically determines whether there are updates to my installed apps. Which I hate, hate, hate! Blinking icon begone, I will install updates if and when I feel like it!

Seriously, is there any way to disable the automatic search for updates? I guess I could disable all of my repositories, but this seems rather clunky . . . after all, I DO want to search for updates every so often, and I would hate to have to enable the repositories, search, then disable . . .

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

it got a time between check setting hiding in gconf, setting a very high value may make it only check once pr year or so.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Hi all.

I have same battery issues on my N800.

I think is due to te memory cards. Both, internal and external, kingston 8Gb micro-sdhc with adapters to sd.

Really annooying.

Re: Dismal Diablo Battery Life - N800
 

Thanks, I will look into this. If it helps with the battery life I'll report back.

Straycat, I feel your pain . . . in my case I know it's not the SD cards, because they're the same ones I was using back in the days of low battery drain.