CM7 battery life...?

[miken]

Greetings all... been a lurker for a while and finally registered!

About a week ago I installed CM7 + JakeBites + Google Apps on my Droid 2. Then I installed my normal handful of apps and configured them with the same settings as before.

Now I'm getting 33% of the battery life I did before!! With the stock Droid 2 + OTA GB + Verizon bloatware I was getting about 24 hours on a charge and now I'm lucky to get a whole work day of 8 hours.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks!

 

[Pmania]

Your doing nothing wrong haha. Cm7 and all cm7 based roms just have crappy battery life. I am running liberty 3 and the battery is a little better. What I would recommend if you need battery life is getting an extended battery and flashing a blur based rom. Welcome to the forums! Haha

Sent from my DROID2

 

[loki993]

Don't know. Some people say the gb build was better. Some say jakebitsb mods were better. I've been on cm7 since froyo and my battery life has always been terrible. I can hardly get 12 hours out of my phone. If I'm texting or using facebook moderatly, even less. A lot less sometimes.

I've tried everything and nothing works. To the point I've basically given up. Of course that's until it dies at like 7 at night again because I was on fb too much or something.

Make sure your never without a charger. Make sure you never forget to charge it at night. I have an extended battery too don't. Never used the standard.
Sent from my DROID2 using Tapatalk

 

[lizard]

Battery life sucks here too. Best battery life I had was on a Foyo based rom, Squidly. I think with Jakebites Mod my battery life either stayed the same or improved a tad, but man o man did it make everything snappier. I barely get eight hours with light use.

Sent from my rooted, and CM7 rommed, Droid2

 

[miken]

Thanks for your responses. I just can't wrap my head around it... it has NONE of the garbage running in the background that the stock system did, yet consumes the battery three times as fast?! There must be some spectacular power management system on the stock rom or power management is very poor on CM7.

What gave me the idea to switch initially was that the stock rom has locked out third party wifi tethering (which I haven't tried yet with CM7), but the battery thing is a deal breaker. hmy:

Thanks

 

[Pmania]

You should try out apex! The battery Is insane!!!

Sent from my DROID2 using DroidForums

 

[havens1515]

First of all, welcome to the forums.

Battery life in CM7 is dependent on a many things. Here are a few that seem to make a big difference:

1) If you flash ROMs/nightlies all the time, your battery life will be shorter because of the use while flashing, and the customization done immediately after flashing. If you flashed CM7 recently, I would say give it a few days before you judge battery life.

2) Usage - people define usage differently, but heavy use on CM7 can definitely kill your battery in a matter of hours in some cases

3) your configuration - I have a heavily customized configuration that I have been playing around with for quite some time to pull as much battery life as possible from the ROM. I suggest using some apps to manage you CPU speed and governor. JakesMod uses the InteractiveX governor, but I (and some others) don't think that's the best for battery life. His mods DO make a huge difference in performance, so I do use them, but I usually change my governor back to OnDemand. I also use System Tuner, which allows you to underclock when your screen is off. This is a great feature, I only downclock to 800Mhz and it makes a big difference. People have had mixed results with JuiceDefender. I used to use it, but stopped when they removed features from the free version and made them pay-only features (Now I use Tasker to basically do what JD does, and have Tasker doing a lot of other things too.)

In conclusion, battery life is a "Your mileage may vary" kind of thing. But if you play around with settings and config, you can potentially pull a lot more life out of your battery. I hope battery life doesn't stop you from using CM7, b/c it is a truly amazing ROM in every sense OTHER than battery life.

 

[miken]

Thanks, I appreciate everyone's input!

I really want to give CM7 a good fair chance, but if I forget to plug my phone in before I go to bed, I'm screwed... I'm pretty much always on call for work, so I need the phone to be forgiving if I forget to plug it in.

I did find that reducing the email checking interval from 15 minutes to 60 minutes added several hours to battery life... to the tune of 5 or more hours! I want to check the underclocking tweak that havens1515 mentioned, also.

In a nutshell, if I can get back to 24 hours life with CM7, I might stick with it.

I might try the Apex idea, too... screaming fast and long battery sounds like me. I won't end up using 99% of the tweaks available in CM7 anyway.

Thanks again!

 

[havens1515]

I forgot to mention also, almost ALL of the apps I use are free. The only apps I've paid for are Tasker ($5 or so) and Boot Manager (I think $4). Other than that, I don't normally pay for apps. So if you're looking for free app suggestions, feel free to PM me or ask on the forums here. (Most of the apps I use are ones that other people on here or Rootzwiki recommended.)

 

[SilverbearSDCA]

Been using CM7 now almost a week and while there seems to be some issues with Camera, I love it. I have not noticed any major difference in battery usage from the Verizon OTA (which I hated - since seemed like they broke everything I liked before and fixed little). Thanks havens1515 for suggestions about underclocking - I'm gonna look into that.

 

[d4dEf@c@]

Yesterday, I was at 70% when I left work. So that would be 30% usage in about 9 hours. I did connect it to the car charger for the ride home 20 minutes. After 6 more hours, when I went to bed it had 60% remaining. I would say that wasn't to shabby.

 

[miken]

@k.c.cole: was that with an extended life battery...? If I could get 9hrs on 30% battery, that would be plenty!

 

[d4dEf@c@]

@k.c.cole: was that with an extended life battery...? If I could get 9hrs on 30% battery, that would be plenty!

Stock battery. I am at 50% after 9 hours today.

Tapatalked from a Liquified D2

 

[loki993]

mine is much worse with the 30th build

 

[breachless]

I could never strike a good balance with battery life on CM7. If you want good battery life on a GB-based rom, Liberty 3 is pretty incredible in this area. You can't customize the hell out of it like you can with CM7, but the battery life is better than anything else I have tried since getting my D2, it's really snappy, and I seem to experience less annoying little issues on Liberty 3 than I did on CM7. Namely, I got my blur camera back, which I love, and it actually works. The dialer is also much better in my opinion, and no more DSP manager force closes either when receiving phone calls. Once I finally broke down and installed a different launcher on Liberty 3 that allowed me to customize my home screens the way I wanted (I tried GOLauncher which I actually really like so far), I reached perfection. I am now a very happy camper.