Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

As usual, my N810 charged during the night and I took it in the morning; it was fully charged. But after about 5 hours, when I took my N810 out of my pocket, it was quite hot and the battery was almost empty! This is surprising as I didn't have any problem the previous days. The CPU indicator was saying the N810 was idle. I only had two open applications:

• X Terminal (with no running jobs in it). This is not the first time (I use X Terminal very often). So, I doubt this is the problem.
• Notes (perhaps the first time I let it open under diablo).

Also, no wifi, no bluetooth. Any idea? Could there be a problem with some software taking CPU time only when the tablet is locked?

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Modest likes to eat CPUs for breakfast...

Naah, with no network probably something else.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

I'm going to call it a corrupt internal card!

But seriously, this has been covered a thousand and one times already. Please use the search first. :)

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

I don't use Modest (I read e-mail only via ssh). Concerning a possibly corrupt internal card, I've search for "corrupt" in the FAQ, and got... nothing! How can I check whether it is corrupt? I haven't got any error message and things like that, and I haven't found any error in dmesg output, and nothing during these 5 hours:

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Er, FAQ?

http://tabletschool.blogspot.com/200...d-on-n810.html

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

I get this on occasion - sit with it charging whilst messing on the computer of an evening, then disconnect and goto bed - i disconnect wifi everynight because i *know* thats a problem with me personally.

Random mornings I have woken up and its dead.

There is a process running amock and eating CPU for breakfast, its not being killed by the watchdogs or anything.
And its not a corrupt card issue because it would be a problem all the time.

I've attempted to run top in the past and log output but it doesnt seem too good for the purpose (it could be a low but constant cpu munching, or not cpu at all, maybe wifi chip or BT chip or gps internals or something).

My best guess would be an application run earlier in the evening didnt cleanup and close everything expected which caused the drain.

Further investigation would require the oprofile kernel flags to be set (or built and flashed) and actually monitor whats happening overnight.

Lots of work though for a random rare (but annoying) occurrence.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

same here, flashed diablo, set up modest ->battery drain
reflashed diablo without setting up modest ->battery drain
reflashed chinook ->all is fine again

chinook vs. diablo

diablo:
pros
agps, fingertap vs. stylustap recognition, update without flashing
cons
only a half-day battery (n810)

chinook:
pros
two days battery, for me better microb rendering (itt for example)
cons
all diablo pros

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

I looked at http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/faq.php

I repartitioned my internal 2-GB card in March. This cannot be this problem.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

I now remember having an almost-emptied battery a few days ago (also after a few hours during the day), and I thought this was my fault. Now, it's probably the same problem. And except once when I started a wifi connection and let it on, I've never had any such problem with chinook.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Uh, the fact that it only contains stuff for BBCode didn't give you a hint? :\

By searching I meant Google. . . .

There have been about a half-dozen threads (and more here, several posted just hours before your own :/) on maemo-users that cover pretty much everything you've ever wanted to know about Maemo battery consumption. Might be worth your while to browse through some of them.

This should get you started.

. . . and this is the search you should've performed before posting this thread. ;)

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

BTW, is it normal that Xomap took so much time?

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

I thought it was hidden somewhere. Why not removing this page?

I did search, but didn't find anything about my particular problem. Note that yesterday, I had no battery problem, with the same installed software and with the same configuration.

There are too many threads. Problems should really by summarized somewhere.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Why remove that page? Just because it's not relevant to certain problems does not make it useless... it has, for example, information on how to search the forums. Which could be useful to newbies.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

That's Reggie's domain.

Perfect candidate for a wiki page!

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Oh my... the ITT Police are at it again...

Give it a rest GA!

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

That's itT Police, sir. And I'm gonna have to write you up for insulting an officer of the forum. :rolleyes:

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Actually Benson since you are making a point of highlighting it, I believe it should be itT (not italic).

:p the signal to noise on this thread has gone downhill, blame GA! :D

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

sorry guys.. but are you incapable of helping someone without making some stupid comments???
btt please!
i've flashed back to chinook because the battery drain under diablo was too bad for me. but i think thats a problem which will be fixed by nokia soon.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

If you don't like the comments, you can get a full refund.
I don't think it's a problem Nokia can fix; I think it's not a problem with Diablo.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Yes, very. You're welcome to take it or leave it. It's no skin off my back. :)

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

I clicked on that link and got:

vBulletin Message
Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Unfortunately, as I don't know what the source of my problem is (I think I can eliminate corrupted memory card and processes that reproducibly take CPU time), I can't add any information for the moment. FYI, the charger cable has been unplugged for 6 hours (the N810 was also most of the time in my pocket), and the battery is still full.

So, it could be a problem in diablo or in one of the applets that occurs from time to time. Or could it be the heat?

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Einstein: E=mc(square)

I think heat is a form of energy. It happens to me on a couple of occasion. The tablet gets warm and the next thing, battery is gone.
And yes, it is a N810. And yes, it is pre-diablo. I have no squirt idea what is going on, it seems it is rare enough, as someone put in, I just move on.

bun

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Could be the problem here.

I didn't have any problem with chinook, but diablo came with the heat. It may not be a good idea to keep the N810 in one's pocket in a very warm room.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

so ignorant... but you are right... just make a usefull comment or leave it. is it so difficult for you?

btt: i don't think that the problem is the general heat in a room or in the pocket, because the n810 itself gets warm like if it is runnig a resojrce-hungry program (video for example).
if you don't think that it is a problem with diablo, what think you then that it is?
for me the problem was away with flashing chinook back

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

problem appeared when I installed Diablo. But after a few battery cycles, it seems to have gone away so far. Could it be that this is a learning process to adjust consumption?
I am cautious however to switch wifi off ( BT always off, it s draining power like crazy), shut down all applications for the night. So this also can explain the disappearance of the problem.
By the way, same problem occured after Chinook plus huge problems in finding my wifi base. It improved with time too...

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Hey vinc17, try to recreate your swap file. I had this once that the swap file got corrupted and used a lot of battery power.

1.Disable swap in the settings menu
2.Delete the swap file manually
3.Create a new swap file via the settings menu

Mabye this fix the issue for you as well. Do you have a spare battery to double check if maybe the battery(hardware) is damaged?

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Another thing - how do you stop your network connections? Offline mode?

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

I don't use swap at all (and I've never used swap). So, this cannot be the problem.

No spare battery. But I don't think this comes from the battery, unless it got hot by itself for no reason.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Yes, as I've said in my initial post, no wifi, no bluetooth. More precisely, bluetooth is permanently disabled. Concerning the wifi, I disconnected in the morning (otherwise, it disconnects by itself when I leave home). I could check when I came back that it did not reconnect automatically (in case of a bug, because automatic connection is disabled).

No offline mode. I just locked the touch screen and keys. Except when I had this battery problem twice, this is sufficient: the battery remains full after several hours.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

If you're not in offline mode, wifi still scans for networks.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

vinc17,

Sounds like the way I use it.

It smells like an application getting stuck processing in the background - or a similar situation involving hardware - maybe when things are being closed its having an issue?

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Bundyo,
why on earth should it?
My 810 is set to not connect automatically and only scans wifi when I bring up the network connection dialog.

When disconnected on a normal day I wake up and battery is still full.
On bad days I wake up and its completely powered off.

My actions are no different on each day.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Is this new in diablo? I never switch to offline mode, and I've never had any problem when using chinook. Most of the time, no-offline-mode seems also to be OK with diablo.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Naah, it shouldn't if you disabled the automatic connect.

I'm always switching to offline, since i like auto connect and don't want to choose the network i want to connect unless i have to. Still some desktop plugins like the RSS reader and omWeather would try to connect overnight (when i didn't switch to offline before) and drain my battery. So at the end i resorted to offline mode to shut everything off completely.

Also in Diablo hildon-application-manager checks every day for new updates... possible culprit too.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Do you charge the device every day?

Perhaps on normal days the battery has a real full charge, but on abnormal days the battery charge is lower (but still enough for the battery icon to think it's full - God only knows what goes on in that Nokia battery charger ;) ).

Might be worth waking the device up every 1/2 hour or so and recording the output of top - any script-writing gurus fancy that?

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Perhaps. I didn't notice CPU activity, but the N810 was warm and if it is an application getting stuck processing in the background, this could have ended when I slided the keyboard out. If I have this problem again, I'll write a monitoring script that logs as much as possible, say every 15 minutes.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Simon,
I left a log running for a few nights a while ago when I first encountered this problem.
But quantum effects got involved and every night I watched it the error did not occur.
(top log every 10 seconds - i even hacked a log viewer on my desktop to try and see)

I suppose from that I could say that running a top log fixed my problem! ;)
*all hail the mighty top log*

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

Usually permanently when I'm at home (since I use wifi here and sometimes do CPU-intensive things).

This can't explain the fact that the battery was almost empty after 5 hours (I didn't use my N810 during that time). Even when I use my N810 with wifi on, the battery is still far from being empty after several hours.

BTW, top and ps (from busybox) don't output the time spent by processes. This is useful information. How can I get it? Note that htop provides it, but doesn't have a batch mode.

Re: Battery almost empty after 5 hours with locked N810
 

You probably need to do that in background, e.g. to log the top output to a file every 5 minutes: