Software that eats batteries

[Jordan Rosenwald]

Thought this was kind of weird... My X30 was acting really oddly, so I did one of my normal hard resets and reinstalled nearly everything. All of a sudden my battery life, as reported by SPB Plus is MUCH better than before. I know the time remaining isn't a hard science and can fluctuate with some significance, but prior to the hard reset a full charge was reporting 2 hours if I was lucky. Now it's reporting two hours four minutes with 74% remaining.
The only thing I can think of is a weather program that I had on my Today screen. I think that does constant polling to find an internet connection... at least I think that's how it updates itself.

Anyone else seen something like this before?

[Menneisyys]

The only thing I can think of is a weather program that I had on my Today screen. I think that does constant polling to find an internet connection... at least I think that's how it updates itself.

Anyone else seen something like this before?

Well, you can easily check the CPU utilization (resulting in high power consumption) by using a tool like XCPUScalar, with its icon on the taskbar. I always use that tool to find out how much power consumption a given app does.

And yes, some Today plug-ins are pretty hard on battery. For example, the scroller applet of VITO Sound Explorer (see my article on voice recorders (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/index.php?action=expand,37799)) consumes really a lot CPU power because of the 50% CPU load.

I don't, however, think making Internet connections every 5-10 minutes would result in high CPU utilization (unless the plug-in is buggy or sloppily coded).

You may also want to read this (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=36376) series of posts on other CPU utilization benchmarks, some of them being other Today plug-ins.