SO. My phone is having Problems. Fully up-to-date Galaxy S5, for reference. Monday night, I notice the battery's draining a little faster than normal. Okay, whatever, maybe the latest update to my blue light filter fucked something up, I can deal. Tuesday morning, I wake up to an overheating warning. Which I've never got outside of heavy use in the height of summer. We only recently turned up the heating for winter so maybe? Something happened during charging?? Unplug from charger, take off the case to leave the phone itself on a spare heatsink, problem solved. Kind of. I go off to work with my cooled phone, at 90-some% battery, all programs closed, wifi connectivity off, and the possibly-fucked light filter uninstalled. The phone remains off and unbothered for six hours-- no missed calls or texts that might have drained battery lighting up the screen. At the end of my shift, my phone's down to 15% battery, and in the two-minute walk to my car (again, screen off and nothing apparently using power) loses another 3%. For reference, normally if I don't text or use the Internet a full charge will last me two days, not six hours. More overheat this morning, still with the hideous battery drain unless I'm plugged into the wall (which leads to more overheating if I'm not careful...), and now adding ungodly lag time for pretty much everything to the list of problems. Typing has a good half-second lag between button push and actual character appearing, apps take two to three times as long to boot. And this all still happens while I'm in Safe Mode (all apps that didn't ship factory-standard disabled), so it's not some game I missed an update for messing up. Out of safemode, third-party software monitor says my battery is perfectly healthy but my CPU is running at practically max capacity (95-98% on all three cores) even with no other apps open. (Eta: Internet is mildly less laggy in safe mode, but keyboard lag remains. Testing apps besides Chrome in a minute here.) Looked symptoms up and got a bunch of results from when the current OS (Lollipop/Marshmallow) went out... two years ago. Which patches have been released to fix. Attempted the suggested fix (clearing cache partition) anyway, to no effect. Thoughts? Suggestions? Next suggested option in the Old Fixes is a factory reboot, but I would rather not lose all my user data... (and I am a bad tech parent who didn't think to back up the mobile device :T)
Galaxies, ime, tend to have batteries that wear out before the phone itself does. If you can, I'd try to find a compatible battery and switch it out to see if this solves the issue. Edit: whoops, didn't see the diagnostic bit. I'm not sure, then.
You Tried, sparkles ::P Further testing, because I got bored waiting for a response: -Only Chrome had the typing lag issue, Notepad and the onboard calculator worked fine. Chrome is also a Factory Standard app, so I disabled it for a bit. Didn't help other lag. -Uninstalled and reinstalled, then updated chrome because apparently it hadn't updated itself? This has mostly fixed the typing lag, but not the overheating. Gonna watch battery drain for a bit, CPU usage is down to 85-90% at least so that's something. Not a lot, but something.
*puts on techmaster hat* I'd also recommend trying a different battery. If that doesn't work, then I'd say make a backup now and then reset it...then if you still have the problem you can load your stuff back onto it without worry. If it does fix it, then just put your stuff back on a little bit at a time (I assume most of your data is of photos and contacts. You can back those up separately IIRC). Did an update come out recently? Maybe Samsung are doing an Apple and trying to get you to upgrade, by forcefully making your phone harder to use. I doubt it, people who use Android aren't typically like that, but it could be. My S7 also has the keyboard lag on Chrome. Have you tried downloading a CPU monitor app? See what's using all the power? Sorry if this isn't super helpful, but I want to fix all tech problems if I can
Alright, after half an hour of "no use" (no charger, screen off, no apps running) I've lost about 5% battery. Still worse than before the whole mess, but not hemorrhaging like tuesday. Score? Still some mild keyboard lag. CPU usage down to ~70-80% with nothing else running, which still seems kinda high for "idle" but it's getting better so I'll take it. I'll see if I can't find a CPU monitor app, see what's chewing up so much. Thanks @Technicality o/
Every electronic for me at least once has reported healthy on the battery despite it being absolute crap, so I'd definitely try that first - batteries are usually pretty cheap, but their failures cause all sorts of issues you wouldn't normally expect, such as ghosting and crashing. Usually it reports healthy when it's capacity is still the same but a hardware failure has occurred, and lately I've seen an influx of expanding batteries in phones, macbooks, and laptops more than I ever have before P: Probably some assembly line shortcomings, but I'm not here to argue why it's happening.
Also: background apps like updates tend to eat up CPU usage, I changed mine to only check for android updates every 2 weeks and it improved my battery life tremendously. I'm not sure if that setting is controlled by your network or not though.
This sounds literally exactly what happened with my Galaxy S4. I worked around it for months before trying a new battery. The old battery was actually swollen when we took it out. Put in a new one and it's been like a new phone ever since. So do try a new battery even if the diagnostic says nothing's wrong
CPU monitor says the thing eating most of my processing power is... the phone's OS. Time to look into a new battery, I guess :T or get a new phone but bluuuuh money
New battery get. Seems to have fixed the loadtime issues with both programs and the keyboard, we'll see how quick she drains. At 98% as of 7:12pm, for recordkeeping purposes. eta: two hours, only down 6%. I think we're good, we'll see how it holds up over a full day tomorrow.
Lag has come back a little but that might just be from wild temperature changes (temperate inland winter is gr8), but battery appears to hold up just fine! Mission accomplished, thanks yall.
Well. That lasted all of two weeks. Over the last two hours, with no apps running and no incoming texts or calls, I've lost 40% of my battery and it's overheating again. Despite the room being frigid, because it's the Computer Room and kept cold for the gaming rigs' sakes, and not being plugged in. bluuuuhhhhhhhh I'm gonna have to go to an actual verizon store aren't I
Sounds like a problem with the heat sink within the actual phone to me, or damage inside the phone from the previous battery
Not happening in safemode this time, which points to an update issue. Bluuuuuh. Time to uninstall everything and Do Science
