First of all, let me start off by saying that 3 months ago when I first got the hero I knew nothing at all about android. I got the hero at best buy and was told about how you have to use a task killer to close all the programs in the background to save battery life. The saleswoman downloaded atk while I was there and instructed me to use it religiously. Now I'm kinda ocd and will say that I never put the phone down without using a "kill all". I've been following the great debate over task killers and figured I'd just see for myself. What I did was delete my taskiller and the did a battery pull and used the phone normally since then. Now I watch spare parts anyways for battery drains and I keep an eye on my up/awake times as well to make sure the phone is sleeping properly when not in use, which is has been. I don't even close out footprints for those reporting problems with it, also i reboot my phone daily. Needless to say, I have about a billion tasks running at all times including 2 different browsers. That being said, if there has been any extra battery drain because of leaving all tasks running then it is small enough that I cant tell, keep in mind ive used task killers since day one of my ownership yet see no difference.