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-- Sudden Battery Drain (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/showthread.php?threadid=2693)

Howdy!

long-time piloteer and four-month IVD user has a RECENT battery problem.

my Visor was doing great on batteries (four weeks) until it SUDDENLY began going through them in record pace (four days).

turning beam-recieve off does seem to stop the drain, but its confusing since this feature has always been set to "on" with my IVD, and i dont know why it would suddenly constitute a major drain.

anyone have any ideas?

I have the same problem. Great "battery mileage" until about a week ago. Then suddenly, battery level dropped from 85% to 0 overnight. Fresh batteries lasted only 24 hours or so...

In addition, now all of a sudden I have the dreaded cycling splashscreen every 3 or 4 times I turn my unit on... (no change in apps installed etc.)

If you have this problem for the first time, try fresh batteries of a different brand - sometimes there seems to be a bad batch of batteries in the store...


WHAT IS GOING ON?
I truly love my Visor, but 3 units in about 3 months shouldn't be normal, should it...?

I do no want to sell my Visor and buy a Palm instead, but eventually I really am tired of this - maybe I should get a 'replacement subscription' from Handspring: Get a new replacement every month...

3rd unit (2nd replacement is on the way...)
Aaaaaargh!

But at least it only took me 5 min to get an RMA# from CS.

<frustrated>
You guys out there w/o problems with your Visors do not know how lucky you are...

mc9

(sorry, but I just needed to vent)

[This message has been edited by mc9 (edited 04-05-2000).]

If you suddenly start to experience rapid battery drain, you should perform a soft reset to see it that corrects it.

You could have inadvertantly entered into one of the debug modes that also happen to eat batteries. A soft reset will exit out of the mode.

Oh and also, you may want to leave Beam Receive off as there is a shortcut to turn it on when needed. It's Shortcut..i and you can enter it from any application, LauncherIII for example. It will turn on beam receieve for about 5 seconds and if it does not receieve a signal, will turn off again.

I've had the same problem with battery drainage, but mine was related to a particular application. For some reason the solitaire game I had would cause my batteries to drain. I would shut off the Visor and later when I turned it back on it had a message about solitaire having a memory leak and my batteries would be at 0.
This has happened twice with brand new sets of batteries. Needless to say I deleted the game from my Visor.

Marfu - which solitaire game was it?

It was the freeware version from smallware. It had 3 different solitaire games: Klondike, Demon and another I don't remember.

Thanks, bregent, but I already tried that several times (hard and soft resets did not change anything). Beam receive is off all the time, and I also tested several sets of batteries.
As I did not change my configuration (apps and the like) before the problems started, I guess it may be a short on the board or something...

Um,... in case you were responding to declana's post, sorry! Then just disregard my post

Anyway, thanks for your help!

mc9

I have had this same problem with my one week old BVD. I put a fresh set of batteries in at night then woke up and it would not turn on. I tried to reset it, but that didn't do anything. So I finally put a new set of batteries in and it worked, but I lost all my memory!! This has already happened twice. Could it be an application I installed or maybe the Tiger Woods Module which I keep in the Springboard slot all the time. Should I call Handspring Tech support. Do you think they would send me a replacment considering I bought the unit at Comp USA.

Well, I tried all the fixes (turning off beam recieve etc) and STILL had dead batteries after four days.
I also checked the Usenet (deja.com) and found LOTS of posts about this problem.
Called HS this morning to get a replacement unit shipped.
Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

I do recall seeing a tip somewhere, perhaps from the tips service at palmgear.com. It indicated that someone had found that normal alkaline AAA batteries seemed to perform better in their PDA as compared to the expensive brands meant for high drain devices like cd players, cam corders, etc. Like Duracell's Ultra, etc.

I had meant to use ATool to estimate this, but I won't know until I get through my current pack of normal Duracells and some trials with other brands.

Which brand of batteries had you used that caused such a drain? You might also want to slowly remove one application at a time to see if there is a combination that is causing it.

My batteries have been working well until recently. About a week ago, my NiCd batteries suddenly died overnight. These NiCd have been used for about 2 months and have exhibited good power capacity. So I threw in some new Energizers (alkaline) and then it happened again, about 3 days later. I did notice that with both situations, when I first turned on my visor, there was a fatal error message and I had to soft-reset.

What the heck is going on???? These fatal messages always seem to pop up every once in a while, especially when my appt alarm goes off. Anybody experiencing similar problems?