Battery drains too fast
 

I've been using a brad new N810 for a few days. Battery used to last for days at first, but now it drains under 24 hours in idle mode (radios off, screen off).

I would like to know is there 'Nokia Energy profiler' or equivalent for Maemo?

Does memory card affect significantly to power consumption? ..had some old card inserted to the device when this problem appeared.

I've been trying different home screen applets and different browsers etc. so I have bunch of stuff installed. Do these normally leave any processes running background if applets/applications are not running? Only background service I'm sure I've installed is ssh server.

Re: Battery drains too fast
 

Hello Amoult.
I'll try to answer you but am myself still a newbe, so ... sorry if i'm mistaken.

1/ As you stated it's not normal, battery life is great on N8xx

2/ I read trough the forums that some softs can drain the battery really fast, especially softwares that are still in beta and available only in non official or garage repositories

3/ Did you install EasyDebian (Qole's amazing work) ? If yes, maybe you put the system in "performance" mode to run it and simply forgot to swich back to "on demand"

4/ Did you install a status bar applet called " advanced power " ? it's very usefull, and gives you an option to change the CPU policy ... maybe it's stuck on "Performance"

5/ I'm not specialist with home applets (I simply never use it) but i would'nt be surprised if one of them is keeping a connection active to check something on internet ... did you try to put the unit in flight mode ? did you try to deactivate all home applets ?

6/ I wouldn't be surprised either if your SSH server is guilty ... maybe it doesn't deactivate properly ? (Never used it, but it sounds logical that it will eat your battery quite fast) try to deactivate or remove it ...

Re: Battery drains too fast
 

there are a number of threads about battery life (see this one for a possibility to monitor battery drain). i followed most of them closely because i used to be affected. summary: there is not the one reason. but SD-cards can be problematic if they don't go to sleep properly. also, of course, software can always drain power.

i'd advise you to monitor power consumption with and without the SD card. if that doesn't make any difference, go through your applets one by one. and please do share your findings: if it's the card, tell us which one. if it's software, tell us and the author of the application.
(btw: i remember somebody suggesting a thread or wiki page "SD cards known to work" or such... but i cannot find it. do i remember this correctly or am i creating another forum myth?)

in my case btw. it was a combination of a bad battery (got a used N800, and although it was in good condition and relatively new, the previous owner must have done something to ruin the battery) and a wireless router that didn't support power saving. fixed both, so now i'm really happy with battery life.

Re: Battery drains too fast
 

Btw Advanced Power Applet is also adding some draining to the fun, though I'm still using it because the Diablo one is plainly broken.

Re: Battery drains too fast
 

Are you turning the N8x0 off between uses? The boot process consumes a lot of power. It was several weeks before I came to the realization that you should leave your N8x0 on at all times and very seldom reboot.

Re: Battery drains too fast
 

This is the exact problem I am having too!! I don't know much about this kind of thing, so I'm hoping that someone will be able to help me out!

I have a Nokia N810 and have have it for about a year and a half. It's always been a little dodgy on the battery life, but lately it's been a lot worse! I take it off charge at 9am, turn it onto offline mode, close all applications, and don't use it the whole day, but by 7pm, it's dead... No battery power at all! And I haven't even used it!! :eek:

If I do use it, I can get about an hour out of it before it dies, if I try with the wireless it lasts about 30 minutes...

I just can't use it like this! I miss my little Nokia lasting the whole day long!!

I've tried a whole bunch of things to fix it... First off I figured it would be the battery, so a forked out and bought a new one. It increase the power by only a handful of precious minutes. After that didn't work, I reflashed it, and now have nothing installed on it besides what it came with, and it still doesn't last any longer.

On top of that, for some strange spooky reason, the clock mysteriously gains 2 hours every day :confused: The other night I was working hard (with it plugged it obviously) thinking it was 11pm... Turned out it was 1am! No wonder I was so sleepy!

But I'm getting a little off topic!

If anyone has any ideas about what could be causing this problem, then please let me know!! I'm getting a little sick of following it round the house with the power adaptor, just in case!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

:D Thanks in advance!!

Re: Battery drains too fast
 

Thanks everyone for the tips. I think in my case the problem is most propably the memory card, as it is some cheap unbranded card and really old. Unfortunately I already had removed some applications so can't be 100% sure where the problem excatly is.
Now I just have to wait and see is there any juice left in the battery next morning..

No.
No
I don't know how to activate flightmode, but all radios were manually turned of and screen off & locked.

No. Device was on all the time.. well battery had died during the night but anyway :/

Re: Battery drains too fast
 

For a quick check start X Terminal and type "top" to see if something is using 100% CPU.

Re: Battery drains too fast
 

Maemo-1 and Xomap are the only ones doing anything (besides Top) and are 6.4 and 0.5 retrospectively.

:D I actually did the top thing all by myself! Wow I'm getting good ;)

I've also taken out the memory card, but mine was not a cheaper make and so far, the estimated number of days left when idle has already dropped another day...

It started off the day saying 12 days! Yay^^ And now it's saying 7 days... Maybe I'm stuck in a time warp :p Days pass me by and I'm none the wiser :eek:

Re: Battery drains too fast
 

I've found that the home applets are major battery drainers - particularly the one that continually probes memory cards to check how much free space is left