For those successful with WM2005, any battery life improvement?

SuperBaby · 12-14-05, 12:23 PM

For those who have installed WM2005 successfully, do you notice any improvement in battery life since your PDA now does not need to conserve power to keep the data alive?

mgupta · 12-14-05, 12:28 PM

Yes. It does last longer.

corman · 12-14-05, 02:10 PM

Because of all of the other problems with WM5, I have reverted back to 2003SE. However, I did notice that when idle my X50V lost less power under WM5. I have a spare battery and put the AXIM in its cradle overnight and rarely ran out of power, so it wasn't such a big deal. I listen to a lot of AudioBooks and when working outside, I found that I could typically get about 7 hours while listening with the display off. I had hoped that WM5 would increase that. However, I found no substantial difference.

I don't think the "additional" power drain to keep memory active while the system is "on" doing something else makes much of a difference under WM 2003SE. However, with the sytem "off" and WM5's implementation of Persistent Memory, the system will clearly use less power. This should only be meaningful to you if you might use your AXIM enough between rechargings to get to the "critical battery" warning point and do not have spare battery to switch to.

Steve C

12-14-05, 03:05 PM

Since upgrading I have noticed somewhat of a difference. So the answer to your question is yes.

Tai · 12-14-05, 04:12 PM

Originally Posted by SuperBaby

For those who have installed WM2005 successfully, do you notice any improvement in battery life since your PDA now does not need to conserve power to keep the data alive?

I get much worse battery life with my x50v running WM5 than I did with 2003se. I do have a secure digital card that stays in all the time, and so maybe I'm experiencing one of the battery drain problems described on this site. But this was a bit shocking. I pulled it off the cradle at work at about 7pm last night and by this morning it was dead. Wouldn't even turn on. I NEVER experienced drain like that under 2003se. In fact, I used it sporatically during the Thanksgiving weekend and it lasted almost 4 days.

Now I have to go check out the forums looking for battery drain problems. In the tips it says set the CPU to the max and that may help. If I can't solve this pretty quick, I'll have to roll back...

SuperBaby · 12-15-05, 03:23 AM

Thanks, guys. I just got a quotation from Dell Malaysia for the WM2005 upgrade CD. The price is about US$17.60

maflynn · 12-15-05, 10:57 AM

My battery life is the opposite. I'm having more problems with it now then I have in the past. My axim churned through an extended battery in under a day. The sad thing is it wasn't on or being used. I'm also getting some sort of memory corruption issue where only taking the battery out and putting it back in, soft resetting it seems to fix it. Again this never happened with WM2003. When I get the chance I'm downgrading.

TwoLeftFeet · 12-15-05, 12:03 PM

Originally Posted by SuperBaby

For those who have installed WM2005 successfully, do you notice any improvement in battery life since your PDA now does not need to conserve power to keep the data alive?

No. My battery flattened in less than 2 days.

12-15-05, 12:24 PM

Originally Posted by SuperBaby

Thanks, guys. I just got a quotation from Dell Malaysia for the WM2005 upgrade CD. The price is about US$17.60

aiks,...i got my dell upgrade cd for RM129.00...why yours so cheap.....anyway...i'm holding off the upgrade till dell releases a new update for the wm5 upgrade..:)

12-16-05, 03:59 PM

I have noticed an improvement of about 25%. I can now regularly go for 12~14 hours (low screen brightness) now vs 8 hours on WM2K3... The key thing is to do the Activesync fix. Without it, your battery life will be about 4 hours...

SuperBaby · 12-16-05, 11:49 PM

Originally Posted by jeffrey

I have noticed an improvement of about 25%. I can now regularly go for 12~14 hours (low screen brightness) now vs 8 hours on WM2K3... The key thing is to do the Activesync fix. Without it, your battery life will be about 4 hours...

What is that "ActiveSync fix"? Maybe I have missed some threads in Axim Site.

corman · 12-18-05, 01:10 AM

I have downgraded back to 2003SE. It may be my imagination, but my X50V loses power a lot faster than I thought it used to when on 2003SE before I went to WM 2005. At first I thought this was just true when the system was idle. That would be understandable. However, it is definitely going down faster even when listening to audiobooks with the backlight display off.

So, either WM 2005 is significantly better on battery usage than WM 2004SE or the act of going to 2005 and then downgrading to 2003SE later did something strange. One thing that is different is that I was previously on A04, but the downgrade places you at A05 for WM 2003SE.

Steve C.

tiger_splash · 12-18-05, 08:29 PM

I've upgraded and have had very few problems. My battery seems to last longer, but that may just be my lack of fear when it comes down to running it down to 0%.

jcpfish · 12-18-05, 10:31 PM

With WM5, I get about 3.5 hrs of constant use with wifi.

SuperBaby · 12-18-05, 11:32 PM

That is a lot, isn't it. I think my WM2003SE/X50v last only for an hour or so with WIFI on.