RE: z50 battery oddity

[Khoa Tran <piper_the%hotmail.com@localhost>]

Hi there!

What does the battery monitor software in Windows CE say? (I think there's a 
graphical battery meter in RapidAccess, if I'm not mistaken). Failing that, I 
do have a couple of spare batteries lying around, in addition to a spare AA 
battery holder. I could possibly lend you one of these for testing purposes.


~k


> Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:24:58 -0400
> From: mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost
> To: port-hpcmips%netbsd.org@localhost
> Subject: z50 battery oddity
>
> I got out my z50 today, and it wouldn't turn on. So I plugged in the
> mains brick/charger and it then would, but it was acting odd: the
> battery light (normally off when on battery, orange when charging,
> green when charged) was blinking between green and orange (rough
> estimate: .5 sec orange, 1 sec green, repeat). Listening closely in a
> quiet environment, I can hear a soft click when it switches from green
> to orange and a very slight high-frequency noise while it's orange.
> The click sounds like incidental mechanical stress from an electrical
> change, not a mechanical switch.
>
> It booted apparently normally and I was able to do what I wanted to do
> (see if a PCMCIA card I dug out of an old box-o'-stuff did anythiing
> useful). While I had it up, it seemed to flip between battery state
> critical and battery state high randomly (according to the kernel
> messages), and, no, I'm not running any kind of non-kernel power
> management software. (The kernel in question is 3.1.)
>
> I tried removing and replacing the battery; this made no apparent
> difference. Pulling the AC power plug produces an ungraceful shutdown
> which produces a cold boot when I next wake it up.
>
> Any ideas? Is my battery toast? It was fine last time I used the
> machine (I put something like 30-60 minutes of run time on it; it
> normally has given me about two hours of run time on a full charge).
>
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