N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

So I have done research on this battery issue and have tried a couple of things (turning off wifi, gps, switching to 2.5G, changing all of my exchange settings), I also changed the pmconfig as was suggested in another thread, but I still have absolutely horrendous battery life. For example, yesterday I left my house at 10AM with a fully charged N900, by 2:30PM the battery was dead and the phone had shut off.

I installed Conky and one process keeps jumping to 95% of CPU usage. I googled it and found two threads about it, but noone really offered a solution. If anyone could suggest an answer, it would be greatly appreciated. I have the latest firmware btw.

The process is called bridge_work-que. One bug report says it is a video thumbnail thing. but they didn't offer a solution. Is there any way to kill this process?

I have wanted this phone for a while, and I like what it can do, but If It can't make it through the day there's no point in me keeping it.

Thx in advance.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

how much do you use it .and what are you using?

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

This bug is fixed. But is a part of the upcoming PR1.2 update. NO dates have been announced. But its expected soon considering its in testing internally by Nokia before its released to the public.

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9084
and related to
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6823

Looks like its caused by playing certain types of videos. I know its no solution, but you could avoid any new videos you've added for the time being or simply restart the phone when you notice high CPU usage.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

Do you know how to kill the process manually?

just in case:

(install rootsh if necessary)

In xterm:

output will be something like:
Where 772 is the actual PID displayed.


Tip: you can use the following as a more accurate way of finding your current battery level:

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

bridge_work-queue is a kernel thread, and cannot be killed via normal means.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

I bet a "kill -9" as root would do it, but that could be dangerous :D

I guess a restart is the only option then :(

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

Thanks for the replies guys. I really hope they get PR 1.2 out soon. I hate that when I want to take my N900 out to wow all my friends, it just shows a black screen and they all laugh at me. :(

For now, I will be avoiding playing video files and the media player in general. I installed KMplayer and I hope that helps.

Thx again.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

No problem :)

Have you tried the WorldTV playlist for KMplayer? I think it may be in the extras-devel repository (be careful what you install from there, some things may brick your phone).

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

No mate your problems are beyond that. your problem is your sd card... i had the exact same problem. battery drained in a few hours because of 100% CPU load all the time. For some reason the files like music and video can be read on a corrupted sd card but indexing these files result in a constant loop.

Every n900 indexes its files due startup. so there is no difference there but as soon as a corrupted- damaged / or wrong formatted sd card is installed. the n900 keeps indexing these files.

Correct me if im wrong but is your n900 horribly slow too?

I fixed the problem by doing a full format of the sdcard in Dos. Windows didn't work and is not formatting very well.

Try removing the sd card and install load applet. see if the CPU stops producing 100% after a while and becomes idle.

im 99% sure that would be your problem.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

I had this process problem. if you read the bug report you notice that having wifi set to not auto search is part of the bug.

ie check, if you've search for wifi disabled, enable it again, know it counter intuitive, but, trust me.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

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

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

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)?

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

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

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

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.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

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.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

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.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

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.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

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.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

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.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

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.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

I have the same problem...

Flashing the cell its the only sollution?

:confused:

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

i was speaking to one of the technitions at my university and he was saying that with laptop batterys you should not always charge it full and run it down in the device. once in a while you should take the battery out and allow it to de charge naturaly. after this give it a full charge without turning it on. you should repeat this prosess once in a while to keep the battery good. sorry for the bad english but does this apply to mobile batterys as well.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

Just an idea:
Try to install "Enhanced linux kernel for power users".
You can set it to "low" power use - this may help to get better battery life, but maybe it will slow down your N900 a little.
And wait for PR 1.2.
Regards.

Re: N900 Battery can't make it 4 hours, plz help.
 

Did you read what trellick said above your post? Try that and of course the obvious thing is that if you have installed anything from testing&devel then it might be case of reflash.