Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

Hi,

I've been here for a while since I've been considering buying a NIT. My biggest hangup has always been that theres no demo units in all of Ontario. So I've never got my hands on one to play with it before I buy it.

One thing that's still bugging me is I had read somewhere on these forums that start up was something like 25-35 seconds. Which surprised me but has me wondering. Is this true? Is this a "cold start" of some sort? is there a way to keep the device active for quicker "warm starts"? Does the battery life prevent the device from sitting in a standby mode for quick access?

I'm a bit worried about that 25-35 seconds I saw quoted. I'd primarily using my device to pull out and jot quick notes, and having to wait 30 seconds every time I pull it out is a killer. I can just see the time adding up over the 10-25 times I'd use it a day.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

May be it takes that much time to cold start. But you never do it.
It goes into some kind of suspend after 1-2 minutes and wakes up immediately when you touch the screen. that way it can stay "on" for as much as 10 days without using.
Turning it off and on again consumes 1-2 days worth of power, so there is now point.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

It is very much an "always on" device.:D

If I know I will not be doing anything with my N800 for a while, I put it into SoftPowerOff. The restart is only a couple of seconds, mainly my fumbling with the on/off switch.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

Yes, startup takes 30 seconds, but my current uptime is 25 days. These are always-on devices that are never meant to be turned off. In that sense, "startup" is as simple as touching the screen or unlocking it.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

25!? days. I have 11 on full charge. How do you get so much battery life out of your ITT?

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

That was uptime, not battery life. I'd bet he plugs it in once in a while. ;)

But battery life is actually up to ~ 1 month if you leave it alone. The ~10 day figure from Nokia's battery applet is quite conservative, unless you have one of the SD cards that slurps juice, or some rogue process eating CPU.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

I'm from Ontario, and before I bought my N810 I went to Tiger Direct and they let me play with it for a bit. If your near a Tiger Direct location you should give them a call and see if they have any in-stock that you cantry out.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

It must have been talked about many times before, but I wonder why the power consumption is so (relatively) high during boot and if it could be lowered by optimizing the boot process further. It would be nice even if most users keep their devices always on.

Over the past year there's been various attempts at reducing the boot time of desktop linux and couple of devs at Intel managed to boot an eeePC (ie. known specific hardware, like our tablets) in 5 seconds.

That said, if the tablet is otherwise considered suitable for one's purposes that 20+ seconds (booting from fast SD card; up to 40+ seconds if one goes overboard with applets running at startup) flies by fairly quickly.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

Mainly as it has to do things. The boot is also slow as the flash file system is compressed (which means more work to be done loading stuff).

I'm not so sure about the 1 or 2 day thing, depends how the battery applet works out its time remaining, it probably falls off a cliff after the hard work of starting up (the prediction that is) and then recovers when its average calculation realises that average consumption is actually lower.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

Mhm... My battery life is ~12-24 hours (offline mode, idle). Now: yes, I do have an old battery now, but I can't remember it was any better in the early days.

If the SD card could be a problem:
How could I tell? Would it be enough to umount both of them on my N800? Or would I need to remove them physically? Or is there something in dmesg that shows power consumtion from the SD is too high?

And, of course:
Once I find out it's the SD cards (or one of them), do we have a list of cards known to play nicely with the device and keep the battery alive?

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

SD cards in themselves don't cause battery drain*. The problem is when the card has some corrupted data. There is a program ( metalayer-crawler ) that constantly reads for changes, and it gets hung up on that corrupted sector pegging cpu trying to figure it out.

The solution is to run fsck /dev/mmcblk?p? to fix the bad sector. You can run that occasionally, and/or disable metalayer-crawler. There is an application to disable metalayer crawler and other background apps (can't find it right now) or by command line.

* As far as I know from reading the forums.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

According to comment #28 in bug 2602, SD cards with bad power management could be a reason for low battery life. (It seems the ppl @ Nokia aren't sure themselves, they put a question mark to this item ;) )


At least I can be sure I'm not affected by this one:
Bug #3970 bit me, so metalayer crawler doesn't even start on my tablet.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

Thanks for all the info guys. I had suspected something like what you've told me with the device being "on" but in a sleep state which is quickly reactivated when need be.

And thanks for the tip about Tiger Direct. I realize they may be my only option for a hands on test. I don't get down to Toronto much since I live/work in the Ottawa - Sudbury corridor.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

That number has nothing at all to do with the battery applet. :) It was provided by a Nokia engineer at some point (igor?), and describes the impact on battery life of the boot sequence, which is about 10-20% of total capacity.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

As benny1967 says, this isn't accurate. Some cards may not sleep properly, which causes them to consumer way more power than they should while they're not in use.

Tama^2 did some testing with two faulty cards in an N800, which reduced the idle battery life from days to a few hours.