Thanks for the info. You know, I never thought about that until you mentioned it. It seems logical that host mode would continue to drain the battery. All I did was disconnect from USB and close the program but failed to take it off of host mode. I'll have to try that. If that's the answer, a huge thanks and a big ooops on my part for not realizing that could be the answer.

I'll follow up with an updated post after I've done some testing and if someone comes across the same issue, they'll find the answer here.

I appreciate the help

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Sorry to hijack the thread tokyodan temporarily, but just to add another big thanks go gbgb for his suggestion, because his advice solved my problem. After doing some testing, my battery doesn't drain the way it did, so I'll just have to remember to turn host mode off when using usb control. Saved me the problem of thinking I had two dying batteries. Think I'll also install pton's advanced power applet recommendation to monitor anything that could drain the battery in the future.

Thanks again guys.

I have a question for all of you who are having battery problems?

Do you use Canola?

I'm not sure right now but my battery seems to last forever when after doing a power reset I never start up Canola. As far as I can remember, it seems that my screwy battery life kicks in after having used Canola. I'm going to keep an eye on this from now on.

And I'd like to ask whoever is having battery problems and using Canola to keep an eye on it too?

i haven't had canola on my machine for about 8 months and i had battery issues (see my prior post in this thread)

What do you use in Canola's place? MediaBox? They both use mplayer which may be the culprit. I'm now convinced that Canola is my problem. Since I haven't started up Canola I'm now going on Day 3 with stable battery life.

i use mplayer

Check existence of mplayer processes after closing it using XTerm
And kill existing ones.
MPlayer's processes drain battery very fast, 'cause CPU is always at max frequency.

prk60091, then it must be MPlayer which probably keeps on keepin' on even after Canola or MediaBox are quit.

Is the problem with mplayer remaining running after quitting MediaBox reliably reproducable? MediaBox attempts to stop mplayer when you quit it, but maybe for some reason this doesn't always work.
I'm working on this.
A workaround would be to let MediaBox run in the background when not in use. It kills mplayer after some minutes and drains no battery. After that, it should be safe to quit MediaBox.

Canola on the other hand starts several processes in the background (not only mplayer). After quitting Canola I often have "atabake" and "canolad" left in memory consuming RAM (and maybe CPU).

Wow! turned on wifi at 6am this morning and forgot to turn it off. now it's 6:15pm and i sttill got 2 hours of 'in use' time left. i guess stawing away from mplayer is the reason my n810 is behaving so well with the battery life. (of course the n810 was idle from 6:30am till now. but the wifi was on.)

You might want to try "top" in a terminal. You dynamicaly get the top CPU users by %. I've just started experiencing battery issues in my 6 month old N810. I leave it on 24/7 but turn off networking at night. All of a sudden it's been dead before my wake up alarm goes off. I'm used to having this batterty technology lasting for years in other devices. I'm continuing to monitor my battery status but have become concerned enough to order a new 1800maH battery from Mugen for about $30. They have a good reputation and the 1500maH Nokia batteries seem to run close to $50. What battery life should I be experiencing with the N810?