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-- Inexplicable Battery Drain (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/showthread.php?threadid=8714)

My batteries used to last me about a week with normal use, including about an hour or so a day continuous e-book/AvantGo reading. Now suddenly, my batteries are depleting after only a couple of days. And I haven't even been using it for reading lately. I checked, and my beam receive option is set to 'off' -- so does anyone have any idea what else might be causing this strange sudden battery drain? Could it be some circuitry malfunction?

Do you keep your visor in the cradle a lot? that seems to drain the battery too....
And ofcourse hotsyncing drains too...

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<IMG WIDTH="200" HEIGHT="50" SRC=http://www.visorcentral.com/images/visorcentral.gif> VisorCentral Discussion Moderator
Do files get embarrassed when they get unzipped?

Have you tried a soft reset? You may have inadvertently entered a PalmOs debug mode which uses battery power even with the device off. A soft reset will remove it from that mode.

quote:

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Originally posted by ToolkiT
Do you keep your visor in the cradle a lot? that seems to drain the battery too....
And ofcourse hotsyncing drains too...

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Hotsync: Power Hog

Perhaps hotsyncing is the culprit. I HAVE added a ton of channels to my AvantGo download list lately. Who would've thought it would make THAT much difference though! I guess I'll go back and edit out some of the channels. I'll try the soft reset too, though, just in case. Thanks!

Instead of removing channels, you could instead reduce their update frequency. For my channels most are set to update only once a day, some every four hours, and only a few every time. With this setup, the first time I sync for a given day, the dialog says something about updating 400 some pages. For later syncs that day it says between 4 and 30. Let's see, I have not synced yet today ...

• First sync, it says removing 216 out of date pages and then updating 435 pages. Total sync time, about 5 minutes.
• Second sync: 11 removals, 28 updates, about 1 minute.
• Third sync: 11 removals, 10 updates, about 1 minute.

Sync Frequency

Thanks, but I only sync once a day as it is -- just so I can get the day's news. If it weren't for AvantGo, I probably wouldn't even bother sync-ing more than once every couple of days...

quote:

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Originally posted by potter

quote:

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Originally posted by ToolkiT
Do you keep your visor in the cradle a lot? that seems to drain the battery too....
And ofcourse hotsyncing drains too...

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According to an old news item by James, the cradle drain problem does not exist in the Visors. (One advantage of not having the extra serial port control lines.) In a nutshell, if the visor is turned off, there is no extra power drain for sitting in the cradle.

Now HotSync'ng is a big power drain.

[Edited by potter on 10-18-2000 at 09:09 AM]

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<IMG WIDTH="200" HEIGHT="50" SRC=http://www.visorcentral.com/images/visorcentral.gif> VisorCentral Discussion Moderator
Do files get embarrassed when they get unzipped?

quote:

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Originally posted by leojbramble
Now suddenly, my batteries are depleting after only a couple of days.

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God bless America, my home sweet home...

I thought the rapid depletion might have just been caused by a bad batch of batteries until it occurred with two completely different brands, one of which was Duracell, which I've been using on a fairly regular basis.

And no, I've never had the memory patch issue. Thanks for the suggestions, though...