[cappy]

Snovvman, I admire your persistence. But if any battery life is saved, it will be minimal and at the margin. Windows is an event driven operating system. Imagine the CPU as a gerbal inside one of those ferris wheels, running and running. Each poll adds a miniscule amount of weight to the ferris wheel, like a snowflake. The heavier the snowfall, the more weight. But you would need a blizzard to really burden the gerbal. The gerbal keeps running at the same pace, using the same amount of energy.

Well behaved programs running in Windows do not measurably increase CPU usage, except when they are actually doing something. Take a look the Task Manager on your computer. There is a function that measures CPU usage. Except for programs that are actually processing something, running programs do not burden the CPU. If you have FcdSoft's Task Manager installed on your device, you can view the CPU usage of the various processes and you will see the same thing. You can be running 10 applications. If they are well behaved and at idle, the CPU usage will hover around 1%.

Running programs consume memory, but they do not burden the CPU or drain the battery, unless they are actually doing something. Start several applications, leave them running, and observe their effect upon the CPU. Unless constantly running a procedure, like calculating PI, they will not add to CPU usage. There are good reasons to close applications when done with, but increasing battery life is not among them, unless the apps are not well behaved and are constantly running a process in the background other than polling.

I think big benefits will be gained by finding those applications that are not well behaved. For example, I have been running Gyrator 2 for a few days. It does not effect CPU usage. However, once during that time it did not release properly and caused CPU usage to remain at 50 x normal. Had I not killed the process, it would have drained my battery completely. I did not write the application and have no desire to debug it. But it has to be watched. In the end, it may not be Gyrator 2 at all, but a bug in the Rotate function within Windows. Also, something either in Windows or an application that is running can cause the Data Connection to stay active. It does not happen often, but when it does the battery will drain completely within a few hours. So until someone finds the cause, the Data Connection has to be watched. Once, I observed that something did not release the CPU, when the Data Connection was dormant. Again, finding what caused this will save big on the battery. Until then, I watch the CPU usage regularly. It is displayed right below my battery icon in the Status Bar. If it stays above 1% for more than a few seconds, I know that there is a problem.

Keep up the good work Snovvman.