Re: Does switching off and on consume more power than standby?
 

Yep. For instance, look at hard drive specifications. This Toshiba drive--just picked at random--consumes 4.7 watts at start up, but then drops to 0.85 watts when idle and 1.9 watts when reading or writing.

Re: Does switching off and on consume more power than standby?
 

Ah, yeah. I always turn off anything when not in use, even my cell phone, it's just habit for me. I don't want to suffer from some type of horrible, searing, electromagnetic flux disease because I keep all of my devices on while I'm at home.

Sorry, but I practice other forms of birth control. :)

Well anyway, I finally gave in to following your guys' advices today and I honestly have to say it was a good experience.

Mind you, I still shut it off three times today even after reading these posts, but finally, I resisted common sense and didn't do it.

I have no idea what happened, but my tablet has never worked better.

Before, I was getting like 5 frames per second scrolling through a web page. Completely chunky and hard to navigate (I thought this was normal). Now it's like 60 frames per second of pure silk to rifle through all of the four message boards that I frequent on the internet.

I'm sure it's just a pure coincidence, but I'm sold on this concept.

I will never turn it off again.

Thanks for whatever reasons, I think. :)

Re: Does switching off and on consume more power than standby?
 

I don't turn off the N800, unless I for some reason want to take the battery out. Doesn't happen often! I reboot occasionally, but only when I'm forced to - as in when there's an omweather (or other applet) upgrade, there doesn't seem to be a way of restarting home applets other than rebooting. Oh, and when flashing of course.

Which means that my 'uptime' (hit 'uptime' in xterm) sometimes gets quite high. As of today it's 35 days, which isn't by far the record.

As for charging:
- The unit can of course be charged while it's on.
- Don't be afraid of charging it whenever you get the chance (think like a soldier and sleep: Get it when you can, you never know when the next chance comes around).
- Don't worry about 'overcharging', this isn't NiCd batteries we're talking about.
- Try to avoid depleting the battery. Every time you do you reduce the lifetime as well as the capacity of your battery.
- Some applications take so much juice that when you keep it plugged in it never seems to reach 'full', even after several hours. Especially if you use a charger that provides less juice than the standard charger, but even with that one you may see this, e.g. if you run the internet radio while charging.
- Lastly, install a load-monitoring applet (e.g. load-applet-run or similar), then a glance at the status bar will tell you if there's some unexpected CPU usage before you e.g. go to bed - that'll avoid waking up to a low or empty battery because some application was running wild.

Re: Does switching off and on consume more power than standby?
 

One unexpected usage I discovered was the "autoscroll" feature of the RSS-Applet: it uses quite some CPU every few moments.
I've now disabled this option on my N810.

Re: Does switching off and on consume more power than standby?
 

Just to reassure you, a battery-powered device gives off very little in the way of EM, and what it does give out drops off so quickly that you'd have to have it permanently next to your skin in order to be affected by any possible ill effects (if they even exist). As EM waves radiate from their transmitter, they spread out so much that they carry very little intensity when you're even a short distance from their source.

People reading this might remember it from Physics lessons as the inverse square law:

http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~afrank...02_019_PCT.gif

The idea of the graph is to show how when you're just a short distance from a source of electromagnetism, it has lost almost all of its original intensity.

Also, the radio transmitters of phones etc aren't active when they're in standby. They might have very short bursts now and then to let the nearest tower/router know they're still there, but they don't really emit anything measurable unless you're actually using them.

You can test this yourself by leaving a phone next to a powered speaker to listen to its radio signals. You'll occasionally hear a sound while it checks in with the nearest mast, and you'll hear a lot of sound if you actually use the phone, but if it's just sitting there unused then the vast majority of the time there will be no sound at all.


I know it's hard to believe, indeed that's why I started this thread, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense.

I used to switch off the tablet, even though I kept my phone on, but now I'm never switching off portable computers ever again.

Re: Does switching off and on consume more power than standby?
 

MMy last reboot was in september of last year. This should also
give an indication of how many system 'upgrades' I've let pass...

Re: Does switching off and on consume more power than standby?
 

Looking at the posts here, there appears to be a concensus of leaving the N8x0 on and seldom rebooting--primarily for the purpose of extending useful battery life (as the boot process consumes significant power).

In a frequent install-new-app/try-new-app/uninstall-new app environment, rebooting can help make your OS run more effectively as those less-than-perfect applications often leave trash in your device, even after they have been supposedly uninstalled.

While looking at the processes running in my N800 (many of them "come and go" frequently...popping up in the list momentarily and then disappearing), it sure seems like there are more processes running under Linux than on my desktop PC.

I use Process Explorer on my desktop and laptop PCs to check processes when things aren't running up to my expectations. It's like looking under the hood of your car to see if something's come loose or needs adjusting.

Is there some sort of list of known processes that we should be aware of and ones that we should be suspicious of?

Re: Does switching off and on consume more power than standby?
 

No wonder you have such a terrible experience with the thing.

Re: Does switching off and on consume more power than standby?
 

Well, let's see:

- Number of SD cards munched by N800's firmware: 0
- Number of times softpoweroff stopped working: 0
- Number of times browser did something weird: 0
- Number of applications that won't work with new firmware: 0

As far as I can tell, I'm still ahead. I'm constantly thinking about "upgrading" to the last version of ITOS2007, but I always end up putting it off, because it's just too much trouble. If Nokia manages to produce a non-sucky version of ITOS2008 before the Pandora comes out, I might give it one last shot. Otherwise, I fear it'll be the mothballs for my Itablets...

My continuing gripes are with the general user interface of the thing, something which has only received token interest from Nokia.

Re: Does switching off and on consume more power than standby?
 

If I can chime in here, my old Zaurus is hardly ever powered off either. It does have a "suspend" button, however, which seems to be something the N8x0s lack, am I right? On suspend the screen goes black and the sound quits working and the wifi (if inserted) disconnects, but when I hit the resume switch again they all come back on as if they were never away. Rebooting the thing takes about 3-4 minutes of activity to bring up the CACkO O/S Qtopia desktop, and does eat a lot of power.