BirdieWatcher.exe = batterydrain?

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spacemanbow
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Joined: Thu Feb 14, 2008 9:21 pm

BirdieWatcher.exe = batterydrain?

Post by spacemanbow »

Hi all,

My first message on this board appearantly has to be a dualfaced one. First of all, I really like BirdieSync as at home I work with Thunderbird and Sunbird, whilst at work I synchronize with Outlook. BirdieSync is great for me as I don't need to replace any of my existing applications.

However, there appears to be some possible bad news too. I only recently installed BirdieSync on my Palm Treo 500V (WM6 Std Smartphone), and since then I started noticing that my battery ran out like crazy. So I checked the running tasks, which were empty (as I tend to close applications from time to time). However, when switching to processes view in the task manager, I noticed BirdieWatcher.exe.
I seriously suspect that this is causing my battery drain (battery runs out 3 times as fast than before). I will try without BirdieWatcher for some time to see if there really is such a big difference.

In the mean time, has anyone noticed this as well? I can't find anything on Google related to the watcher app and batteries....

Birdy
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Re: BirdieWatcher.exe = batterydrain?

Post by Birdy »

Hello spacemanbow,

That's rather strange. BirdieWatcher.exe is inactive most of the time. I suppose that to consume some battery, a process would have to regularly consume some CPU time ?
Birdy

spacemanbow
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Feb 14, 2008 9:21 pm

Re: BirdieWatcher.exe = batterydrain?

Post by spacemanbow »

@Birdy

I've been running for about 24hrs without birdiewatch.exe (just killed the process, and did not sync with the pc anymore) and worked a lot with the 500v. The result was that the battery consumption was considerably lower.
One would indeed assume that an inactive process wouldn't consume a lot of battery. However, I've read some reports on other applications (e.g. Battery One) which prevent the device to go a "deeper sleep" mode or something like that.

I would really like to investigate this further, but up to now I haven't found a suitable CPU monitor and process explorer for WM6 Std smartphones... If anyone knows of such a thing, please let me know.

I'm not a WM6 apps programmer, so I don't know if the following is possible. Instead of having a background application like BirdieWatch.exe, would it not be possible to have a plugin (or conduit in the old Palm world) which runs via ActiveSync, and is only activated when ActiveSync pushes (or pulls) data to (from) the device?

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