Okay, so I know that when there's a sudden decrease in battery life it's usually a process that's eating up CPU cycles. However, I have the load meter program installed, and I am not noticing any erratic CPU usage.

I was getting a few days in standby, and easily 4-6 hours with normal usage. But all of a sudden, after a full charge in the daytime by nighttime the battery is just about done, even if it's been idle the whole day.

The only software changes that I've made recently (that I can remember at least) were uninstalling gpe-calendar and installing mcalendar since the former kept crashing on me.

Are there any other steps I can take to troubleshoot before I just reinstall the OS to make sure it's not a defective battery?

For some reason I feel like something is accessing the internal memory. The device has been getting quite warm sometimes, but it might just be due to the warm weather. Again, I haven't noticed any weird CPU usage with the load meter. One time I tried to connect to my PC via USB and it said it couldn't because the internal memory was being accessed, even though I had no running programs.

Some general info: The device was purchased new just a couple of months ago. It's an N810 with the latest Diablo OS.

Even a few days in standby seems short. I get over a week of light usage + standby between charges on my n810. Perhaps you got a dud battery?

Wow. A week. Hmm, maybe I did. Before this drastic decrease, I would say I used the tablet for just a few minutes on some days, or not at all on other days and I could never reach a week. Perhaps I will order a replacement soon to test.

Or check your desktop/tray applets - a constant small leak can drain the battery too.

Woops, I forgot to mention that the only desktop applet I had was OmWeather and I disabled it for troubleshooting. As for tray apps, I haven't changed anything recently so unless something got broken it shouldn't cause any problems. I have the beta messenger. Advanced Backlight app, load meter app, large clock, and the Japanese character input thingy.

So right now it's completely idle (as far as I can tell: no apps running and load meter is not moving) and it's showing 5 days standby and 4 hours with usage. If the problem still exists, I'm certain that by tomorrow morning the battery will be nearly dead.

mcalendar has a bug where it will stuff the alarmd list with google syncs.

your sure your not experiencing that?

and about internal memory, do you have swap enabled?

also, there could be that media player crawler in action, unless you have that disabled...

How can I check for the mcalendar bug?

I do have swap enabled.

And I'm not sure what you mean by media player crawler. How can I check for that?

I appreciate the help.

for mcalendar, only thing i can think of is either firing up wifi and look for multiple python processes, or have a look the content of /var/lib/alarmd/alarmqueue.xml and look for multiple references to mcalendar.

with swap enabled, if there is any app (or part of its memory allotment) that happens to get swapped out, the internal memory will be marked as in use until reboot (or said app is restarted or for some other reason gives up that allotment, or gets it moved back to ram).

the media player crawler is better known as metalayer-crawler.

Alrighty, so I checked alamqueue.xml and found no references to mcalendar.

metalayer-crawler is running. Might that be a problem?

edit: I must be losing it because I don't see mcalendar in my menu or in application manager. I must have uninstalled it to see if that was the culprit. I don't think so though, because when I wrote this post just a few hours ago I had 5 hours of usage time, and now I have only 3, even though it has been idle the whole time except for a few presses every once in a while to check the battery life.