on 8/17/01 8:03 PM, James Elliott at rootbeeraddict_at_yahoo.com wrote:
> Now I get an orange light when it is in the charger as well. It also
> discharges quickly. Is there anything to be done about this? Also,
> my Newt normally restarts when I give it a new set of batteries. It
> doesn't when I put in the rechargable pack. Now the bar indicating
> battery level just shot from about thirty percent to full! Can this
> be trusted?
Let's see if I can do this in order... :-) From posts on this list, and
heavy thinking, dragging out my memory, it appears that batteries don't
charge as well in the base, charging better in the Newton in the base
itself, so your experience seems to be in line with that.
Your Newt will restart if you drain the batteries so low that it shuts off,
and you try to restart it, or the batteries drain too fast for the Newton to
shut down properly. Do you get a message on restarting, that a power
interuption caused the system to reset? If so, then that's your problem.
Otherwise, it might be that your lithium backup battery is shot, but I've
never personally experienced this.
As for the battery status on the display on the Newton, you can't trust that
for and when charging. It shows actual power to the Newton, and since you
are on the mains, it shows full voltage. If you were to take the Newt off
the stand and wait a few minutes, you would see the display drop back to 30%
or so. You are much better served by the little yellow light on the stand
than the display on the Newton.
Having said all the above, I feel I should warn you that charging
non-completely discharged nicad batteries is not necessarily a good thing. I
believe there are people on this list who will disagree with that, but my
experience is the opposite. Here is kind of what happens (with fear and
trepidation at the war I'm about to start) :-) : When you partially
discharge a nicad and charge it again, it somehow "remembers" that point
where you started charging. The next time you go to recharge it, it only
charges up to that point that it "remembered" the last time you charged it.
If you do this enough, you can completely wear out a nicad. This is called
the "memory effect." Newer batteries don't really suffer from this problem,
but nicads are susceptible and particularly so. So, my advice would be to
always discharge your batteries down to the very end (even forcing a restart
if necessary in my book) before you charge them. It's really tempting, with
the stand, to just plop the Newt in there, and let it go, but I have put a
little piece of electrician's tape over the little charging contacts, that I
can flip back when I want to charge, but which cover them when I don't. This
has helped my batteries to survive me for years of solid use. :-)
Hope all the above helps, and any errors on my part will be corrected, and
any arguments over batteries will be nice. :-)
-- -Jon Glass Krakow, Poland <jonglass_at_usa.net> <glasshaus5_at_aol.com>"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." --John Adams
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