My Dad came to me with a problem on his Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone that many people seem to be facing. Apparently, the phone’s battery was draining. Fast.
I stopped all background tasks and did a reboot, but the device’s battery went down around 50% in an hour on standby, and much to my horror, continued draining even while charging. All this while turning really, really hot.
As it turns out there are loads of people having this problem, on WPCentral’s forum and elsewhere. I tried some of the fixes, including:-
- Uninstall Skype
- Reinstall apps that use Background Tasks (only one I tried that with was WhatsApp)
- Disable background tasks
- Turn off Xbox Sync
- And of course, reboot
I started going through all available settings and found that under “email+accounts”, Microsoft Account was in a “synchronizing” loop. The “synchronizing” message appeared and disappeared constantly, and clicking on it returned a very interesting Error Code 0. I then tried to sync his Google Account (both Outlook and Gmail reported “Email is up to date”) and got greeted with an synchronization error telling me to correct the device’s date/time.
As it turns out, I didn’t bother looking at the date on the phone (the time was right), and it was somewhere in 2012, so synchronization couldn’t happen due to all the authentication mumbo-jumbo. I quickly corrected that and rebooted (still wasn’t fixed before rebooting), and Microsoft Account synchronized perfectly. Looks like somehow the phone got stuck on some retry loop, without any error messages being shown to the user.
My Dad’s phone is back to draining at a perfectly healthy 1%/hour on standby.
tl;dr, if you’re facing this problem, check your device date/time settings. Hope this helps!