Wifi is not causing a 95% load, instead it keeps running in the background. the 95% load is caused by indexing the mediafiles.

temporary solution might be to take off all of your media files and reflash.

when pr 1.2 comes out put your media files back on.

if you 'have' to have the media then add it in small chunks to try and diagnose the problem file(s)?

media files would mean only music and videos or pictures as well???

Or maybe you don't go all destructive on your phone and delete a bunch of stuff. Just charge the N900 to 100%, remove the flash memory card and see if it helps, like sygys said earlier. Boom, you solved it without deleting or flashing anything.

This is an interesting problem.

On stanby my phone can do a whole day but web browsing on its own drains my battery very fast. 1 hour online browsing takes it to almost half life. The integrated IM sucks the battery even faster.

Anyone else have this problem? or is this just how N900 consumes power.

Thx again for all the suggestions guys.

I already reflashed and did the pmconfig thing.

I'm fairly certain the problem isn't either an SD card (since I don't have one) or WiFi (cause I have had wifi switcher installed and wifi shut off completely).

Now that I am watching Conky, I'll see if it can make it through the day today or what, if any, processes go haywire. I took it off charge (full) an hour ago, and I have been listening to music for that hour. So far the battery in Conky says 87%. A 13% drop in one hour. I don't know if that bodes well or ill.

In any case, I'll report back when I get home in about 5 hours.

13% an hour is not true, it never charges to 100%. It's more like 10% and that's real well, since you getting 10 hours music out of the device is quite an achievement.

Also, browsing is quite a load because of wifi security - it drains quite a bit with high traffic.

Overall, you should expect the N900 to be charged in the morning, and get 1 hour music, 1-2 hours browsing and some fiddling and make it home still powered up at some 6 PM.

Also, watch the screen brightness, it's a whooper. I keep mine at 2/5 blobs, and try to not cover the light sensor.

Maybe you have some other battery problems too? I've got it connected to wifi ~90% of the day and on 2G the rest. Got foreca and twitter widgets. I'm logged into 3 jabber, 1 voip, 1 skype accounts and checking 2 imap emails.
Even with some browsing during the day and playing games on the bus, I can get ~25-30h of battery life every day. 9h (9am - 6pm) seems really low.

I cant help but think 3G has a big part to play in the battery problem.
I live in London where 2G/2.5/3G/3.5G are all coming and going. The phone continously switches between them as I browse the WEB/IM.

During a 2 week trip to Pakistan where they only have 2G, I could use IM/Web for 4-5 hours non stop with only half battery drained. That's really astonishing! Im tempted to just use 2G here but the speeds are horrible.

No SD card installed. Native barebones N900.

Not sure if this is the exact same issue, but I had similarly awful battery life. From 90% it couldn't last 12hours with NO usage from me without completely draining....
and that was even with 'Wifi Switcher' installed so that the wifi module was unloaded from the kernel, and the phone network forced to lock onto one provider on 'GSM' (2.5G).

I live in an area that is on the cusp of my main GSM provider, so was thinking that constant network searching/attaching was my main problem.

Was pretty unhappy, when a friend who has experience of BlackBerrys suggested the following:

i). With a reasonable battery charge (i.e.not completely empty)
ii). power down. i.e. off. no power. nothing. nada
iii). take battery out/in
iv). keeping it powered down, charge up for 10->12hrs...do not touch it..don't even look at it!
v). power back up

^all of this forces the phone to recalibrate its battery settings, I'm told.

I went from 90%->0% in 12hrs, to 95%->80% in the same time period. i..e battery icon still showing full.

Ok with very limited usage from me, and still on GSM, locked telco and Wifi unloaded. But, a great great improvement.

This has been mirrored for the last couple of days. The next step for me is to turn on 3G and watching it over the next couple of days. (BatteryEye is your friend here).

IF the 3G test works ok for then I'll monitor usage with the wifi module loaded back into the kernel..(no actively searching).....then try it with the wifi module as 'normal'....

I must admit I've now gone/going from the N900 being a permanently plugged in lump to actually being quite portable.

Hope this helps.