Battery Woes or Programming Woes?

[Zatx]

Ok, so I have the standard battery for my Axim x51v and it has served me well these last 2 months, but recently I have attended several meetings where I retired my legal pad and decided to use MS Notes on my Ax to...well.. take notes.

Well I found much to my dismay, that I could almost watch the battery metter go down from the power drain. In a 40 min lecture I might take 10 rows of notes and my battery dropped 15-25%. So play that out over an hour and thats around 30-40% drain. That seems way excessive to me.

When I run iSilo and read a book, I can read for an hour and the battery might go down 5%.

No other programs were running in the background, no activesync, wifi, BT, or anything else. Which is the same way I run iSilo. Both MS Notes, and iSilo run at the 204mhz level on my Ax.



What could be causing such a huge drain in MS Notes?


Now lets assume I'm going to need a second battery. I searched ebay and found tons of replacement batteries at 1000mah. Isn't my standard one from Dell 1100mah? Why the descripancy?

Where is a good spot to pick up a battery that will fit the standard case. I don't want to replace all of my cases for extended battery cases.


Thanks again for all your help.

[Zatx]

Sorry for the bump.

Any advice?

[dyastrab]

If you decide to get a new battery, try www.aximcases.com. You can get a 15% discount off of the battery as an aximsite member. (Scroll down to the bottom of the cases page for the batteries).

[deejoshy]

Have you applied the fake server trick? If not, that's why your battery is draining so fast. I can point you to it if you haven't.

Dave
Washington, DC

Ok, so I have the standard battery for my Axim x51v and it has served me well these last 2 months, but recently I have attended several meetings where I retired my legal pad and decided to use MS Notes on my Ax to...well.. take notes.

Well I found much to my dismay, that I could almost watch the battery metter go down from the power drain. In a 40 min lecture I might take 10 rows of notes and my battery dropped 15-25%. So play that out over an hour and thats around 30-40% drain. That seems way excessive to me.

When I run iSilo and read a book, I can read for an hour and the battery might go down 5%.

No other programs were running in the background, no activesync, wifi, BT, or anything else. Which is the same way I run iSilo. Both MS Notes, and iSilo run at the 204mhz level on my Ax.



What could be causing such a huge drain in MS Notes?


Now lets assume I'm going to need a second battery. I searched ebay and found tons of replacement batteries at 1000mah. Isn't my standard one from Dell 1100mah? Why the descripancy?

Where is a good spot to pick up a battery that will fit the standard case. I don't want to replace all of my cases for extended battery cases.


Thanks again for all your help.

[Zatx]

Activesync was not running, but yes the server tweak is in place. It seems that this quick battery drain only occurs when Im using MS Notes. iSilo will run for hours on end with no problems.

I'm stumped.

Are there other MS Notes type applications out there I could try to see if they aren't as battery draining?

[benots4]

I just did a test just for you. Opened notes for the past 24 minutes and kept it alive. took some notes and such. Made sure the screen stayed on. Over that period of time my power meter went from 88 to 87%. I even did a recording.

You might just want to try again. Could be anything included flaky power meter.

[Zatx]

Thanks for doing that Benots.

I disabled my battery meter (which is included in Vbar) and still had the massive battery drain.

I'm going to try and conduct some more quantifiable tests of my own to try and discover the culprit.

Are there other MS Notes type applications out there I could try to see if they aren't as battery draining?

I use PocketInformant's Notes.
It syncs with Outlook.
It came with PhatNotes Lite, but that doesn't sync with Outlook, so I stopped using it.

The higher version of PhatNotes does sync with Outlook though.

There are also many other similar programs.

I would try using magicbutton instead of vbar. I tried vbar 2.2 earlier and my battery went from 22% to 20% in a matter of 10 or less minutes. Try it and see if it helps.

[Iniquity]

I'm testing right now to see if VBAR is draining my battery, even with the power meter disabled....

i think since i've installed vbar, leaving my x51v in standby overnight the battery is drained.. forgot how much.. but before vbar, leaving it in standby overnight caused no battery drain..

another consideration as to why it's specific to the notes program.. are you using transcriber? that takes quite a bit of processing power.. if you're on auto it probably jumps it up to max performance... If you haven't done so already, you should configure transcriber to your writing style so it spends less time recognizing

that's all i can think of.. vbar sucking the life out of the battery (testing this on mine right now) or transcriber kicking your cpu into overdrive..

[scott wilcox]

again i use Omega ones' battery pro. Yes you have to pay for it although it's quite cheap. NO probelms with power drain and it does not demand constant resets like magic button does.