Help Inconsistent Battery Life

[tandy400]

Battery life with the S3 has been pretty inconsistent for me. Sometimes I can go two days off the charge, while others I am lucky to get 8 hours. Currently I am getting 18min./%, while one day over the weekend I was getting about 60min./% while in standby. Tried running ATK and the regular task manager to close all programs and clear the memory, but the discharge rate stays the same. Even turning off Wifi/Data network doesn't help.

Are there any good diagnostic apps to determine what is killing my battery?

 

[UserName872]

Battery life with the S3 has been pretty inconsistent for me. Sometimes I can go two days off the charge, while others I am lucky to get 8 hours. Currently I am getting 18min./%, while one day over the weekend I was getting about 60min./% while in standby. Tried running ATK and the regular task manager to close all programs and clear the memory, but the discharge rate stays the same. Even turning off Wifi/Data network doesn't help.

Are there any good diagnostic apps to determine what is killing my battery?

Right off the bat... Get rid of ATK. Anything beyond the stock task manager is causing your battery performance more harm than good. I am tied up at work and unable to explain but a couple quick searches of the forums or perhaps someone with a free minute could explain why the first thing you need to do is can the task killer.

 

[CDPlant]

Lifehacker has a pretty good explanation of why you shouldn't use them - Android Task Killers Explained: What They Do and Why You Shouldn't Use Them

Android handles the memory by itself, and will get rid of apps if needed. However it shouldn't make much of a difference if you have lots running at once anyway, as free RAM is wasted RAM

 

[tandy400]

Just to follow up - I ditched ATK for an app called "Watchdog" from Zomut as mentioned on the LifeHacker article above - instead of just killing apps willy nilly, it will alert you if an app is consuming too much CPU (not RAM) while on standby. As it turns out, there was an "Android media process" task that was eating up 50% of my CPU. From what I read through a couple forums, it is due to a corrupted file somewhere - so I unmounted my SD card, killed the process, and haven't had the problem since. Fully charged my phone last night and I've been running 14 hours off the charge, currently at 77%, and expected to last another 60 hours on standby! I am also running on power saving mode with Wifi and GPS off. Thanks for your help!