Memory Loss During Battery Change

EBELING · 01-05-04, 12:10 PM

I always keep a spare battery on the cradle charging and change batteries when the installed battery starts to get low. I have had a complete (RAM) memory loss on two different occasions when switching the main battery to the spare battery. The back up battery was at 100% both times. I was able to do a restore of the memory, but that takes several hours.

Has anyone else experienced this problem and/or have any ideas on why it is happening.

01-05-04, 12:31 PM

When changing the main battery, the backup battery is supposed to supply sufficient power so that you don't experience RAM loss but this is not over a sustained time. It sounds like your backup battery is not doing what it is supposed to do.

aturner · 01-05-04, 01:11 PM

I have experienced the situation in which a perfectly fine backup battery suddenly reads 0% charge, but upon opening the backup compartment and re-seating the battery, all is fine. Others here have reported similar problems with the contacts of the backup battery.

I would think it is possible that during the process of changing batteries, enough jarring of the case happens to temporarily lose contact with the backup battery, resulting in data loss.

Perhaps opening the backup battery compartment and looking at the contact mechanism (and perhaps, ever so carefully bending the contacts up) will help understand the problem.

EBELING · 01-05-04, 04:30 PM

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try to bend the contacts up and hope it takes care of the problem.

pswets · 01-05-04, 11:37 PM

aturner gives sound advice. You might also try polishing the backup battery and the contacts with a clean cloth. Oh, and try not to touch the backup battery after; oily fingerprints and all, you know.

I got lulled into a false sense of security with the "cry wolf" backup battery warning behavior of some of the earlier ROMS of PPC 2002, and almost got bitten (operatively, "almost") swapping batteries recently. There turned out to be nothing wrong with my backup except a bad connection, fixed by cleaning. Not that my axim would have known why it lost all its data.