When the Battery Vampire Strikes

For me it was last week. I own an original Droid that has served me well for about a year now. I was happy to get the latest Android update, which is 2.2.1. Everything had been working fine until last week when I noticed that my phone was a little warm. Having learned the qwerks of this phone I know that if the phone is warm then it is doing a lot of processing. So, I checked the battery level and the processes that were running. The battery was already down to 50 percent and the day wasn't even half over which is odd for this phone. The running processes looked a little odd to me also. Near the top of the list was "Android OS" and "Email" which is usually closer to the bottom of the list.

Now I'm not saying that the update is the cause of this but it did come to mind. So, over the weekend I did a little research. I found that there are some other people that started having a problem with this also. Nothing that I read clued me into what was going on until I came across this post on the Android Forums. I gave the suggestion a try and I disable syncing for just the calendar on my Exchange account. It worked! I was excited but still baffled as to why this would have happened. The next day everything was good until the evening and I noticed that my phone was a little warm again. I checked and my phone was at it again. This time I decided to disable automatic syncing and it stopped the constant data flow. Phew. I started to think back to when I noticed this problem and what it was that I had done in my Exchange account. I remembered on the two days that this had happened I entered a couple of appointments into my calendar through Outlook 2007. It didn't make any sense that my phone would still be acting up without the calendar being syncronized.

I decided after playing with a few more settings to just remove my exchange account off of my phone and then recreate it. When I added the account back in I left the boxes unchecked for syncronizing the calendar and contacts just to see what would happen. For now everything is working as normal but I can't continue without my calendar and contacts being synchronized. I will continue diagnosing this problem and update this post when I learn more. If anybody else may know what caused this or how to fix it please leave a comment.