[Captivate General] evoic:
TL: DR - Use Rescan Media, win.

So, I think that I've finally found the source of my constant stress regarding the battery life of my beautiful Samsung Captivate SGH-i897.

I know that a good majority of you have just rolled your eyes in disbelief, or just thought to yourself, "Great....another one of these threads".

If it helps one person get their battery life under control, then roll away.

I've had the phone for about 2-3 months and I've been active on these boards since a few days after getting it.

I've recalibrated, done the on / off / on / off trick, battery stats delete, deleted battery info from CWM, tried a second battery, used battery monitors on the phone, turned off wi-fi, turned off auto-synch, turned off bluetooth, lowered display brightness, and everything else I could think of to conserve juice.

Yesterday afternoon, I downloaded OSMonitor from the market in an effort to try another app in a long line of failures.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary so I was going to give up hope.

While installed, I had clicked on the box to monitor the app in the notification bar.

I noticed that I would have times where the CPU was being maxed but nothing strange was being reported in OSMonitor.

And then it hit me.....

The entire time I'm watching the OSMonitor, I'm being distracted by the media scanner.

It's running over and over and over and over and over.

When the screen shuts off after 30 seconds, it comes back on, the media scanner runs.

When I update something from the market, the media scanner runs.

When I close a program, the media scanner runs.

It is running constantly and maxing my CPU to 100%.

It finishes fairly quickly, (I have 9.4GB / 13GB available on internal and hardly anything used on my 4GB external SD card) but it just KEEPS....ON.....RUNNING.

I do a quick search, stumble upon the .nomedia file trick from XDA archives, and VOILA ! ! ! !

I'm losing about only one half of one percent per hour while it sits on standby, where I would sometimes lose 10-11% per

hour

, when the phone isn't even being used by me.

I went to bed last night with 48% at around 3:30am.

It is approx. 11 hours later right now.

I've made approx. 8-10 calls, checked my email a few dozen times, and mostly just let the phone sit.

I'm sitting at 39%.

Previous to doing this, I would have lost that amount in one

hour

.

So, for anyone who has a phone that is losing battery life like it's going out of style, I highly recommend doing the .nomedia fix.

I did mine using ES Explorer and Super Manager.

Go into your root folder and add a file named .nomedia, then go into your external SD folder and do the exact same thing.

If you do not want to do it this way, you can go the easy route and add a program called Rescan Media that does it for you.

(link supplied)

Hopefully this helps at least one lost soul, I'm so happy to see my phone behave more along the lines of what my expectations were and not have to be fully charged 2 times per day. :)

For the record, I've tried the following ROM's for the Cappy:

Perception

Phoenix

Assonance

Darkytt3r's port of Darky's ROM

Stock ROM (ODIN Rooted)

Cognition

And the following kernels:

Glitterballs

SpeedMod

SetiroN

Xcalibur