Battery dying quickly the last few days ("Media" related?)

[vertigoelectric]

Lately I've been finding it generally taking a lot longer to charge my phone. I usually charge it at night while I sleep, but a couple of nights ago I just left it unplugged. I don't remember what level the battery was. By morning, the battery was completely dead. I had to plug it in for a while before I could even turn it on. This is NOT normal. Even if the battery were already low, it would still last the night on standby. It'd just be a bit lower the next morning.

I tried this again last night, but this time I noticed the battery level was 80... plenty to last all night. When I woke up, same thing. Dead.

I checked the battery usage in Settings, but it doesn't seem to give very much useful information. However, I noticed that the item "Media" has the highest battery usage by a big margin (not counting the display, which is NOT what's killing my battery here, since it remains off at night).

View attachment 48754
http://snaps.vertigofx.com/007/snap410_2012-04-01_14.46.54.png

^here's the Media details for battery usage. The first time I checked it, it was actually around 77%.

Can someone help explain what this screen tells me? Why is Keep Awake more time than CPU total?

Also, if one or more of the Included packages is causing the battery to deplete so fast, I can freeze it, but I don't know which ones are safe to freeze.

Unfortunately I never really looked at the battery usage before having this issue, so I'm not sure if this Media entry is normal. It might be something else. Whatever it is, it's quite troublesome.


I have a scheduled reboot to occur around 2am while I'm sleeping, so if anything is left running on the phone when I go to bed, it shouldn't be running all night. That is, unless it's something that starts up when the phone boots. There are also battery saving Smart Actions and stuff that run while the phone is idle at night. I disabled these in the meantime so I can see if there is any change by morning. In the meantime, I'm hoping someone can let me know if I can safely freeze any of those packages without effecting my use of the phone. As a note, I use 3rd party apps for music, gallery, etc.

 

[DocsDad]

I had the same thing happen. Fast drain related to "media". I thought it was related to me putting a movie on my phone. Guess not.

Well, I force closed this media, rebooted and have been fine since.

Sent from my DROID RAZR MAXXusing DroidForums

 

[vertigoelectric]

Thanks for the reply. The notification email ended up in spam somehow... seems inconsistent because they don't usually.

Well, I went ahead and 'froze' a few of those 'included packages'. Wish I could remember exactly which ones. I could check now but it's a long list. After freezing the drainage issue seemed to go away. The only one I had to unfreeze was Media Storage because that prevented the camera from saving photos. So far I haven't noticed any other ill effects.

 

[FoxKat]

Lately I've been finding it generally taking a lot longer to charge my phone. I usually charge it at night while I sleep, but a couple of nights ago I just left it unplugged. I don't remember what level the battery was. By morning, the battery was completely dead. I had to plug it in for a while before I could even turn it on. This is NOT normal. Even if the battery were already low, it would still last the night on standby. It'd just be a bit lower the next morning.

I tried this again last night, but this time I noticed the battery level was 80... plenty to last all night. When I woke up, same thing. Dead.

I realize the issues you had may have been caused by something else, but I would like to suggest you at least run the phone through a full battery meter "training" session. This will do two things for you. First, it will assure a full saturation charge of the battery, and second, it will recalibrate the battery metering system to the actual battery capacity. This may be the reason why it seemed to use 80% of the battery overnight and instead run completely dead. Truth is, it may have only had 20% or so but was reporting 80% in error. This would explain why it died overnight.

First, power the phone off by pressing and holding power and then choosing "Power off"

Next, plug the phone into the wall adapter charger cord.

The phone will appear to be booting normally with the red M circle logo, however it will instead then change to a large animated battery display with a moving "liquid" level to represent the percentage of charge in the battery, and will also show the percentage of charge in numbers.

Allow the phone to remain plugged in for several hours. If it's a RAZR (not the MAXX), it can fully charge to 100% in about 3 hours during Charge-only mode. If it's the MAXX, it may take 4-5 hours to complete the full 100% charge.

If you want to see how far along it is at any point, tap the power button ONCE briefly. It will take about 3 seconds to wake up and display the large battery again. Don't hit the power again, but instead simply allow it to time-out and it will power down again on its own.

Now disconnect and power the phone up normally. Use it as you would normally, but DO NOT plug into the charger until it has reached 15% - Low Battery. Then do the same steps as above again.

After the 2nd full saturation charge, the phone and battery will be properly calibrated and the phone will represent the proper charge level, which may prevent the issues you had where it "appeared" to have plenty of power but then in a relatively short timeframe it was dead. It will also protect you from accidentally deep-discharging the phone and possibly rendering it completely unresponsive to charging.

 

[vertigoelectric]

Thanks for the tip.

 

[vertigoelectric]

Today I went to my parents' house to do some work. I plugged my phone in when I got there. I was there for a couple of hours at least and didn't touch my phone at all. When I left my phone was at 100%. I used it for music on the way home (maybe 15 minutes), did some web browsing and a couple of games for less than half an hour. By then it was already at 60%. I rebooted it and set it down so I could take a nap. Only about 3 hours later I woke up and tried turning it on. It was dead.

This is getting ridiculous. On one hand, I can see how the battery power level display can be incorrect and cause confusion, but even if that were the case, something else is still very wrong. The amount of time it stays on compared to the amount of time it spends charging is way out of whack. What else I find so strange is that the battery only seems to die when I'm sleeping... not that that's relevant, but it's still strange.

After it charges and I turn it back on, I can take a look at what's eating up the battery. After freezing those media items the other day it seemed fine for a while. Now it's even worse than before.

I'm going to try to leave it only for a few hours so it can fully charge before I boot it up, then basically not charge it again until it dies on its own (unless something comes up and I need it). This might fix the accuracy of the power reading but what is going to actually fix the problem with power consumption?

 

[FoxKat]

Today I went to my parents' house to do some work. I plugged my phone in when I got there. I was there for a couple of hours at least and didn't touch my phone at all. When I left my phone was at 100%. I used it for music on the way home (maybe 15 minutes), did some web browsing and a couple of games for less than half an hour. By then it was already at 60%. I rebooted it and set it down so I could take a nap. Only about 3 hours later I woke up and tried turning it on. It was dead.

This is getting ridiculous. On one hand, I can see how the battery power level display can be incorrect and cause confusion, but even if that were the case, something else is still very wrong. The amount of time it stays on compared to the amount of time it spends charging is way out of whack. What else I find so strange is that the battery only seems to die when I'm sleeping... not that that's relevant, but it's still strange.

After it charges and I turn it back on, I can take a look at what's eating up the battery. After freezing those media items the other day it seemed fine for a while. Now it's even worse than before.

I'm going to try to leave it only for a few hours so it can fully charge before I boot it up, then basically not charge it again until it dies on its own (unless something comes up and I need it). This might fix the accuracy of the power reading but what is going to actually fix the problem with power consumption?

Your detailed experience points to something (or things) installed that are causing the unprecedented battery consumption. There's no good reason or charging/discharging routine that would explain going from 60% to stone cold dead while in sleep and after only 3 hours. Are you sure the phone actually went into sleep once it was fully rebooted? There could have been any number of processes that could have hung the system and caused it to suck the life out of the battery while it may have appeared to be in rest state.

The levels of the battery are likely not THAT far off to cause what you've experienced. I would recommend NOT letting it "die on its own", but instead once the phone says "Low battery, connect your charger", I would take that to mean that you should connect your charger. Draining to 0% does nothing more to tell the meter that the battery has reached its lower threshold than letting it drain to 15% does. Once it says, "low battery", it knows the voltage level of the battery and sets the low battery flag.

As for what's causing the problems you are having, there are several troubleshooting processes you can try.

Safe Mode
Turn off 4G
Reduce screen timeout time
Check social network apps to see if they are updating and how often
Uninstall any task killers
Unfreeze any apps that are frozen
The list goes on... (others can add if you wish)

Then of course, there's the Factory restore. If it STILL does this after a Factory restore, then I'd point to the hardware as the cause, but there are plenty of things between where you are now and a full restore that could be behind this.

Good luck!

 

[vertigoelectric]

You made a very good point. When the phone reboots, I'm already in bed to go to sleep. Something could be starting at boot and eating the battery until the phone dies again, leaving nothing for me to find when I wake up.

Back when I said I froze some media items, I also disabled my Smart Actions. For a while, I have been using Smart Actions to reboot my phone at 2am if it is NOT charging.

Even though I usually reboot my phone when I go to bed anyway, I also usually have it plugged in. This would obviously prevent it from dying and from rebooting via Smart Action.

The first time this happened a few days ago, I didn't plug it in. The Smart Action would reboot the phone at 2am and whatever causes the hang would load at boot and kill the battery before I woke up.

When I froze those apps, I also disabled Smart Actions. When my phone wasn't dead the next morning, it could have been because the phone wasn't rebooted on its own, but I gave the credit to freezing the apps.

That doesn't explain today's nap, though. Hmmmm... the last thing I remember doing with the phone before going to bed was adding some apps to the Task Manager's auto-kill list. After that I turned the screen off and set my phone down. I don't think it rebooted, but I'm not 100% sure. The memory is blurry.

My whole purpose for having the phone reboot while I'm sleeping is to kill anything that might be running before I go to bed so that the battery DOESN'T die. I gotta find out what's running when the phone boots. I'll try doing some diagnostic tests.


UPDATE
When the phone reached 100% I unplugged it and turned it powered it on. I sat it down next to me and watched a couple of episodes of House MD. I then came to the computer and typed the post above. I went to get my phone and it was already down to 60%. Never even used it for anything. I checked battery usage info and the "Media" item was at 75%. The three "included packages" that are not frozen are:

com.motorola.android.omadrm
com.motorola.burstmodeviewer
Media Storage

I know I can't freeze media storage. I'm researching to see if I can live without the other two to see if freezing those will eliminate this ridiculous Media thing.