My Galaxy S3 has been overheating and the battery draining quickly for about a week now. When I check I find that an application called Media is running in the background and is using a huge amount of processing power. I can kill this process from the Running section of the Application Manager but it keeps turning back on. I can't find Media as an application or I would just uninstall it. When I manage to stop Media running my phone goes back to normal until the blasted thing starts up again. Can anyone help me to get rid of it or kill it permanently it please?
I think that I have found the answer myself. I noticed that the overheating and battery drain problem was particularly bad whenever I ran the program QuickPic. The Media background process started to run when I used QuickPic and was difficult to stop. All I did was to uninstall QuickPic then reinstall it and the problem seems to have gone away. Time will tell but I think that I've cracked it as my phone has been cool for a few hours now and the battery isn't draining any more than normal. 
- Mar 9, 2012
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Welcome to Android Central! Glad that you found the problem. Do you have a lot of photos stored on an external SD card? Sometimes, if a photo is corrupt, the Media Scanner can get hung up on it, and cause the system to work overtime. (The Media Scanner is the component that scans all storage areas for media files, and populates the appropriate databases in the system so that the Gallery and the Music apps know what's on the phone.)
You could see what happens if you remove your SD card, because if you remove the source of the corrupt file, the Media scanner won't get hung up. Unmount the card first in Settings>Storage, remove it, then reboot.
You could see what happens if you remove your SD card, because if you remove the source of the corrupt file, the Media scanner won't get hung up. Unmount the card first in Settings>Storage, remove it, then reboot.
Your suggestion seems to be working B. Diddy. Without the SD card my phone is running cool again. While it is removed I have been backing up the SD card and my backup software is coming up with a couple of errors on image files in the cache that another program has made. I wonder if that is the problem? I'll delete that cache (13.7Gb!) and try the SD card in my phone to see if it still runs properly.
Rukbat
Retired Moderator
- Feb 12, 2012
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That's ridiculous! That's probably being caused by the same problem that's causing the phone to run hot and Media Scanner to run a long time. (You can make it happen on any computer by looping a file or folder back into itself - we used to do things like that for fun back in the day. Disable interrupts, then jump back to the jump instruction - the only solution was the power switch. We actually had a contest for the shortest possible program to clear all of RAM - I think the winner was 3 bytes long. Happening by itself isn't fun, it's a bug.)
Please help TiaMy S3 battery charge lasts about a half day-when it's sitting idle. It also gets quite toasty while sitting doing nothing or in my pocket doing nothing. Sometimes it reboots-seemingly for no reason. Maybe overheating causes it. I've removed the SD card and rebooted. It continues to show the same poor performance
As far as returning it as defective-I tried that with Sprint, where I've been paying $11/month for over 3 years. They sent me to Assurion, their insurance provider. Assurion wants $150 to replace the phone. The same phone that I've paid over $400 in insurance to Sprint.
In summary Samsung S3, Sprint, and Assurion all suck big time. I'm stuck with a defective Samsung S3 unless I pay another $150 on top of the $400 I've paid to insure the phone against defects and breakage.
As far as returning it as defective-I tried that with Sprint, where I've been paying $11/month for over 3 years. They sent me to Assurion, their insurance provider. Assurion wants $150 to replace the phone. The same phone that I've paid over $400 in insurance to Sprint.
In summary Samsung S3, Sprint, and Assurion all suck big time. I'm stuck with a defective Samsung S3 unless I pay another $150 on top of the $400 I've paid to insure the phone against defects and breakage.
I've had my Samsung Galaxy 3 for almost 2 years now. I had a problem with the unit getting really hot.2 days ago. I decided to power it off and didn't turn it on again for hours as it wasn't needed. When I did turn it back on, my battery was at 1%. After recharging, it seemed fine until today. Usually, with minimal use, my battery is at about 74% when I check it the next morning and I always re-charge to 100%. Today it was at 34% and I don't think I used the phone at all yesterday. At least it's not getting hot anymore.
I read through alot of the posts here and it brought up a question or two. The last thing I did on my phone before I found it overheating was to show my grandson a 5 second animated gif I just put it on my phone that day. Google said to be able to play a gif, I had to use the ES browser and Google Photos. When the phone started getting hot, I minimized the gif so I could get back to it later if I wanted to play it again. I assumed once minimized, it would stop playing, but now I'm wondering if that kept going over and over and caused the overheating and the first battery drainage to 1%?
The other thing I question is that it's the first time I used Google photos with a browser and there were pages of instructions that I didn't have time to read, but got a notification later that it created an album (or tried to). I'm wondering if this is part of the problem too? The gif has nothing to do with today's drainage to 34%, so something else has to be causing it.
Any help would be appreciated...Sue
I read through alot of the posts here and it brought up a question or two. The last thing I did on my phone before I found it overheating was to show my grandson a 5 second animated gif I just put it on my phone that day. Google said to be able to play a gif, I had to use the ES browser and Google Photos. When the phone started getting hot, I minimized the gif so I could get back to it later if I wanted to play it again. I assumed once minimized, it would stop playing, but now I'm wondering if that kept going over and over and caused the overheating and the first battery drainage to 1%?
The other thing I question is that it's the first time I used Google photos with a browser and there were pages of instructions that I didn't have time to read, but got a notification later that it created an album (or tried to). I'm wondering if this is part of the problem too? The gif has nothing to do with today's drainage to 34%, so something else has to be causing it.
Any help would be appreciated...Sue
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