How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

Is there a way to switch the N800 off automatically after an inactivity timeout?

It may be my imagination, but after installing OS2008, the battery life seems shorter than with OS2007.

That's why I'd like the N800 to turn itself completely off after an activity period.

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

You do realize that power cycling pretty much nukes your battery, right? One power cycle is equivalent to about 2 days of idle time.

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

Processor runs at it's full 400MHz speed in OS2008. Good.
Kernel has a dodgy cpufreq in OS2008 to switch the speeds. Bad. (Well the dodgy cpufreq is anyway)

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

If I don't turn my new N810 off I get less than a few hours of battery life with no apps running. Switching off extends that to a day and a half.

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

Then there's something wrong. Idling on wifi you should get 4 days, idling disconnected you should get 10-14.

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

I easily get better battery life leaving the tablet on then when I do switching it off and on.

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

Nokia have told me the battery life on my N810 is normal. I cannot understand why you may be getting more than myself but I have never been able to get more than I have in the month I have had my unit.

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

They're wrong. You should have 4-5 hours of active wifi usage, about 8 of semi-active usage, 3-5 days idle on wifi and 10-14 days offline.

If you're getting significantly less than that, then something is wrong. Maybe one of your cards is corrupted and metalayer-crawler or something is choking out. Maybe you have some process of some sort cooking the CPU.

There are a number of things that can go wrong, but the battery life you're describing is highly atypical.

Personally, I'd start by reformating the internal card.

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

Yep. Recently I got exactly 4:35 hours of nonstop browsing with my N800 and a cheap Chinese battery from ebay.

But I noticed that out in the woods, when hijacking an open wlan with a weak signal, battery life is definitely shorter then.

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

Battery life aside, does anyone know if there is a way to cause the N800 to shut off completely after an inactivity timeout?

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

Reflash your NIT and leave it always on. Usually the battery drain is gone after a reflash. Better wait for Diablo to reflash.

Turning it off after inactivity is no solution for this problem. I wouldn't even call it a workaround.

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

My battery life when I got the IT was awful, but now it is fine.
I removed the active applets on the desktop (wireless monitors etc), turned the wifi to never automatically search and timeout after 10 minutes.
It doesn't affect anything in the use of it, but now the battery lasts quite a few days of non use, or a few hours of full use. Before that it never made the day.

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

To directly answer the OP: I know of no way to do that; if you really, seriously, are determined, I bet you could hash something up with dbus-scripts, watching for the screen to dim.

But I'm with GA et al.; you don't need that, you need to find out what's slaughtering your battery.

Candidates to check:

• metalayer-crawler: automatically background crawling on this class of device is just plain wrong, imho. It impairs battery and usability (even when it is working right) if you put in a card with several GiB of stuff; it's known to go berserk when it hits a corrupted filesystem. The built-in media player is pathetic anyway, so nuke this.
• Web browser: sometimes goes mad after going to certain pages (likely Flash-related, but not sure), and sucks 100% CPU for the rest of the session, even when on a clean page. Use a CPU monitor in the statusbar, and close the browser at your earliest convenience after it goes mad.
• RSS reader: I don't use it, but it's widely considered bad for CPU usage.
• Skype: only saw it go nuts once in several months, but you may as well close it if you're not online.
• WiFi searching: scanning for APs is very power-consuming; if you're in marginal coverage, it may drop, re-scan in 10 minutes, and repeat. Turn off auto-connect, if it spends much time in marginal areas; otherwise it's normally not a problem. (But you could anyway...

Re: How to switch off automatically after inactivity?
 

I never know for certain when I put the device into its case whether the battery will be there when I go to use it again. Turning it off is one way to guarantee it will not have a completely drained battery when I go to use it again. I now lock the screen and put it into offline mode when not in use. This seems to help.