Windows 10 Mobile and Hard Resets

[aimulaidni]

Lol, yeah, but I wouldn't even call it "usable".

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Did almost all the things you mentioned in the list. And that's what is confusing, I don't see any app that is causing a massive drain but I still turned off most of them. The only thing I don't know how to do is changing the setting from LTE to 2G, I had looked around for a setting for this but didn't find it, so assumed it didn't exist in WM10. How do we do this?

settings > networks > cellular > see if there's a drop down menu for connection speed

Is location on for you? Location can also use some battery power
The other thing you could so is not use an app for a a day and see if that makes a difference. Do this for different apps every day and see the difference.
What does your battery usage statistics show you? Can you post a screenshot?

 

[Maurizio Troso]

Uninstall Microsoft Healt app, if you used it. Still drains a lot

 

[rambo47]

This is a good list! The only thing is a "smart phone" to be "smart" (to the extent possible really) needs to have background services running. So, turning off that (except for emergency situations) seems to me to defeat the raison d'etre of the smart phone - don't you agree?

Exactly! Turning off features and essentially turning your smartphone into a dumbphone (or a BlackBerry) is not a real solution. How about if the manufacturer just makes the thing properly so it works? What a novel idea!!

 

[Maurizio Troso]

Exactly! Turning off features and essentially turning your smartphone into a dumbphone (or a BlackBerry) is not a real solution. How about if the manufacturer just makes the thing properly so it works? What a novel idea!!

Essential services always work. Check yourself. If you turn everything off, your phone continues to receive and making calls, chats, notifies, going internet, and telemeter itself. Services are for accessories like meteo, whatsapp, healt, black list filter, and so on.
CrapDroid doesn't allow such a deep control

 

[Maurizio Troso]

This is a good list! The only thing is a "smart phone" to be "smart" (to the extent possible really) needs to have background services running. So, turning off that (except for emergency situations) seems to me to defeat the raison d'etre of the smart phone - don't you agree?

Not correct. Most of users doesn't know everything they install on your phones stays on background, till phones collapse and drain. And essential services cannot be stopped anyway.

 

[pankaj981]

WM10 was buggy when it launched. Since 10586.107 (RTM for older devices) and subsequent updates have really ironed out the experience. Older devices have received their fair share of firmware and OS specific fixes than the newer Lumias that's why you'll see more complaints from the 950 family owners and less from the 8.1 gen owners. As some of the wise mentioned earlier, hard reset should only be a last resort (I believe a dead flash is a better choice) for software quirks that may not be solved via a soft reset or simple restart, it cannot replace a known OS or system level bug. Like a Lumia 930 has bad battery life period, a hard reset might make the situation slightly better but not solve the issue. Most hard resets are suggested for Insider builds and it makes sense too. But for regular production releases, a hard reset every month should not be necessary unless the software patch was not installed correctly (due to a corrupt update) or if a particular Windows Store app is acting wonky because the end user forgot to update it to the latest "fixed version".

Disabling background apps is only for power users, for regular users it shouldn't really make a difference because the usage scenario is completely different. Once a regular user starts using their device heavily they automatically tend to become a power user and eventually learn about disabling background apps.

The point is, hard resets on W10M are not required.

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Exactly! Turning off features and essentially turning your smartphone into a dumbphone (or a BlackBerry) is not a real solution. How about if the manufacturer just makes the thing properly so it works? What a novel idea!!

This post is worth reading: http://forums.windowscentral.com/microsoft-lumia-640/427834-legend-lives-nokia-battery.html#post3501051

 

[Werentuckl]

Woaahhh.... Hold it there! I'm being cited here on something. :O I feel all important and officious here right now. :3

-- W

 

[PF Mail]

But like I mentioned in the post, it's exactly what's happening...It slows down over a period of time and a hard reset seems to be the only solution. 8.1 never slowed down, but for me 10 is going in a completely opposite direction. That's why I was planning to sell this phone and get a 930.

Isn't the 930 a lesser phone than the 950? I don't think the problem is the hardware.

 

[ttsoldier]

I am thoroughly happy with 4-5% phone idle...

different strokes for different folks I guess.. lol

 

[wgs84]

This is a good list! The only thing is a "smart phone" to be "smart" (to the extent possible really) needs to have background services running. So, turning off that (except for emergency situations) seems to me to defeat the raison d'etre of the smart phone - don't you agree?

You make a good point that disabling background services on a smartphone dulls the experience of owning a smartphone in the first place, but like Chintan Gohel mentioned, the trick is to fine-tune the list of disabled/enabled background services so that only the stuff that matters to you can work in the background. Also, things like configuring the email sync schedule help a bunch. I'm able to get the consumption down to ~1% per hour (idling), while the background services that I actually care about still remain active.

4-5% idling is unacceptably high for me. That's like 36% gone overnight. If I saw a 4-5% drain on my phone, I would jump straight to Battery Use to see what's chewing up so much power. Both of my parents' 640 and my 635 (all .338) get between 1-2% idling, and with Battery Saver, the consumption rate goes down to 0.5-1%. Never 4-5% while idle, unless OneDrive is working in the background to upload videos. Not even my GS7 eats up 4-5% an hour while idling. In an eight-hour period, my GS7 consumes around 10%, and that's with everything on.

 

[prasi55]

Maybe you've already done this, but I've found that changing the diagnostics setting from Full to Basic makes a huge difference to battery life. (Settings > Feedback and Diagnostics > Diagnostic and usage Data > Basic.

Also, I've noted that Whatsapp consumes a lot of battery even if it remains in the background. (You could verify this by noticing the percentage of battery drain that an app contributes while in the foreground vs background.) So I make sure to long-press the Back key and actually close WhatsApp after every instance of responding to chats.

Other than this, I get standby battery drain of about 1-1.5% per hour (Lumia 950), which seems perfectly acceptable.

 

[Panos Athanasiou]

i dont know for normal people but the only time we needed to do a hard reset on phones on insider was when the upgrade was sluggish. After the upgrade the phone would become slow and such things but now on redstone there are no problems like this i have done all the updates and the phone still has the same performance sometimes better even if it is upgraded and not hard reseted to become newer. So i dont think what applies to android and ios applies to windows since i never needed to hard reset or lost performance even with upgrades from insider.

 

[grazy1982]

slightly off topic but having issues with the track pad in continuum; this is just not working and so you have to use an external mouse.

its doing this on both a production build 950 and and redstone build 950XL. this is the issue i have had with both phones really!

I've been told the only way to fix is hard reset but quite reluctant to do it as i don't use continuum that often and hoping it will get fixed in a future update?

but if i do a hard reset can anyone tell me how having a SD works? if i have apps and photos saved here i hear a hard reset or a recovery flash will not touch this data?

what happens when the phone is then turned on? will it just reinstall the apps after sign in as normal? so i am assuming its painless compared to my 1020 which only had internal memory?

any advice?

 

[Ten Four]

I've used a hard reset (but restored from backup) several times with my Lumia 640 on the Insiders program after updates in order to get performance back, and it has generally worked. But, the hard resets have not cured all the bugs. As some have mentioned, it seems to be a good idea to do a hard reset after a major system update, and as others have complained it is a huge pain that shouldn't be required. I did one when .318 arrived and I didn't realize until over the weekend I had lost my Internet and MMS settings in the process so had to live with no data for three days.

When you do the hard reset make sure you are up to date on our email and photo sync, etc. I have everything backed up to OneDrive in addition to what is on the SD card. During the process you can choose to wipe the SD card too--obviously, don't do that if you want to keep the card contents! Once it has reset your apps will load up along with a lot of your settings (not all, unfortunately) and you will go through a long process of app updates. In my experience the main processes take at least an hour or two, but with all the app updating and setting resetting the process really takes a day or two before things settle down. In other words, don't start it until you know you have a quiet couple of days ahead of you and you won't need that phone for anything mission critical!

 

[Maurizio Troso]

I've used a hard reset (but restored from backup) several times with my Lumia 640 on the Insiders program after updates in order to get performance back, and it has generally worked. But, the hard resets have not cured all the bugs. As some have mentioned, it seems to be a good idea to do a hard reset after a major system update, and as others have complained it is a huge pain that shouldn't be required. I did one when .318 arrived and I didn't realize until over the weekend I had lost my Internet and MMS settings in the process so had to live with no data for three days.

MMS and internet settings could be asked to your carrier or google, their name is APN settings

 

[Ten Four]

MMS and internet settings could be asked to your carrier or google, it calls APN settings

My small carrier is PureTalk, running on the AT&T network. I could have called them to get the APN settings, but after a lot of trial and error I have found the correct settings to work the best and they are not exactly the same as the carrier provides! I have them written down at home and I was traveling where I had no access to wifi even.

 

[aimulaidni]

The option to change from LTE to 2G isn't there on my phone (looked under the settings you provided)...but yes, my location is always on, kinda use it for Cortana

 

[aimulaidni]

No, I don't use Microsoft Health