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A question about the battery drain. please help !

Hi all. I (like alot of people on the forum here) have a really bad battery drain on my n800. I looked up at the CPU usege of different programs and noticed that 'hildon-desktop' and 'xomap' are always using quite alot of CPU power. I have no idea what these two programs are? Can someone tell me if I can kill them and if this will help on my battery life??? Thank you in advance

Re: A question about the battery drain. please help !

The main battery drainer is metalayer-crawler imho. Search for it in the forums. 90% that's the culprit.

Re: A question about the battery drain. please help !

On my system the wifi signal strength makes a big difference
At home with a good signal the unit can sit all day with no significant drain.
At work with a very poor signal the battery barely lasts a day.

Re: A question about the battery drain. please help !

Many people get an exaggerated idea of the battery drain by relying on the battery status statistics. They look at the status and it says that the battery is "almost full". Five minutes later the battery is empty, and they say "man, what a drain!"

The battery status statistics are basically worthless. In order to talk about battery drain, you need to measure how long the battery lasts from fully charged to almost empty. And even that is not so good, because wise techs here recommend against discharging your battery that far.

I'm not criticizing the posts above, just adding one fact to help put seeming incidents of rapid battery drain into perspective. It's like having a speedometer that goes from 0-60 in 1 second. It could be that your car is really powerful. Or it could be that the speedometer is broken.

Re: A question about the battery drain. please help !

hey guys. can you please tell me what I was asking for in the begining of the topic. I appreciate your answers but I already know all of this.

Re: A question about the battery drain. please help !

As you can guess from the name hildon is the desktop application i.e. the GUI that applications run inside. I'm sure that someone will correct me if I'm wrong but I'd think of it as like gnome or kde an a standard linux box. Not sure about xomap, but since the tablet uses an omap processor I would guess x for omap.
So my guess is that they are the X server and the gui.
Two things you can't really do without.

Re: A question about the battery drain. please help !

First, sorry for my poor english...
I've got a lot of battery drain with the applets which supervise the OS or the wifi strengh. without those applets, and with closing all the auto-refresh web pages (browsers games) when i left the device, no more drain.

Re: A question about the battery drain. please help !

Quote:

Originally Posted by geneven (Post 188913)

What happens to me fairly regularly is I'll have charged up my N800 at home overnight. I'll then use it on the train on the way to work for 30 minutes or so. I then lock the screen, and put it away for a few hours. Then if I'm heading out to lunch, or heading home and pick up the tablet it will have switched itself off and won't turn back on until I charge it. I've found that if I leave it in offline mode this doesn't happen everyday, but it will still go from a full battery meter to turning itself off in a couple of hours of non-use.

On my laptop, it is set to hibernate when I close the lid, so I can walk away and come back a couple of weeks later and it will still have power. How can I get the same thing with the N800...I've read that turning it off is bad for battery life, but that obviously has to depend on how long you go between using it, right?

Re: A question about the battery drain. please help !

dqkata contacted me regarding this via PM; I just saw the thread and thought it would be profitable for others who might see the thread with similar issues to see the full discussion:

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Originally Posted by Dqkata

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Originally Posted by Benson

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Originally Posted by Dqkata

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Originally Posted by Benson

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Originally Posted by Dqkata

Hi. Nice to meet you. My name is Delcho and I'm from Bulgaria. I've seen alot of your posts and I noticed that you understand alot from internet tablets so I decided to write you and see if you could help me. I have this bad problem with battery drain on my n800. I read probably every topic here that someone had written but I can't fix it. I checked CPU usege of my programs and noticed that two things are using quite alot of CPU ALWAYS - 'hildon-desktop' and 'xomap'. I have no idea what these two are?? Do you think that if I make the ''kill process'' on the osso-statusbar-cpu application, on both of them, I will get back my battery life to normal again?? Thank you in advance. Delcho

xomap is the X server; it handles the display. Kill that, and your tablet shuts down... so not it.

hildon-desktop, on the other hand, is only the user interface on top of X, and it'll be restarted if you kill it. (You may have to reset all your applets how you want them afterwards.) It has all desktop applets inside it, so if one of them is taking too much CPU, it shows up there. Sometimes when you kill it, and it restarts, it takes care of the trouble temporarily, but if you've got an applet running that habitually goes into a busy-loop, you'll need to find out which one and stop using it, and also report it to the maintainer of that applet as a bug.

Thank you so much. Than I'll kill the hidon-desktop. But lets say there is really an app that is cousing the battery to go down so fast. How do I find which one exactly it is?

First, not apps; only applets show up through hildon-desktop... Try removing them one at a time; or look to see if anyone else has reported grief with any you are using; RSS reader and some GPE stuff, I think are known.

Sorry for bodering you again. I made the 'kill process' through the 'osso-statusba-cpu' app but all I got was a white screen for couple of seconds and than it showed me the desktop and everything was exactly like before (no restart, nothing) I restarted it myself but nothing happened. It is still over there and it is still eating my CPU. Did I do something wrong? or is there some other way of killing it?

What does (no restart, nothing) mean? If hildon-desktop closed, leaving a blank screen, and then was back again a couple seconds later, it seems like it restarted from here... :rolleyes:

Of course there are other ways of killing it; but killing it will not solve the problem. Sometimes, depending on the runaway applet's characteristics, it provides temporary relief of symptoms. (Picture someone being bashed over the head with a big rock, fracturing their skull; and taking morphine to kill the pain. Not a fix.)

Re: A question about the battery drain. please help !

Quote:

Originally Posted by dylanemcgregor (Post 188944)

It shouldn't be doing this! :-) My tablets both stay on for days at a time if I don't use them, I've never had them switch themselves off.

(Incidentally, I assume you never switch your tablets off?)

If you want to isolate the problem you might want to try reinstalling the firmware. After the reinstallation, don't alter any of the settings and don't install any apps. See how long the tablet lasts when it's still "plain vanilla".

If the tablet still drains too quickly, it may well be a hardware fault and you'd have to get the tablet repaired or replaced.

If it doesn't drain too quickly, try putting in your usual settings and see if they affect the drain.

If the settings don't cause a problem, try installing your usual apps.

If the apps don't cause a problem either, then your problem has gone away...