My poor little UMP2k has seemingly developed some power problems. About a
week ago, in the middle of the afternoon, it refused to turn on. I know
that my NiMH pack was well-charged, so I took it out for half an hour and
then put the batteries back in. It came back to life (after asking me to
calibrate the pen, of course). A few days later, it happened again. This
time, even after taking the batteries out for an hour, my Newt still
wouldn't wake up. I had to go home and plug it into the AC adapter to get
it to wake up.
When I put my NiMH pack back it, I opened up the Battery Info slip in
Avi's Backdrop to see what was going on. The voltage on the pack was
measured at 4.9v! I thought this was rather low. I let it charge
overnight.
This has continued to happen over the past few days. I switched over to
some Alkaline AAs, but they quit in much the same way the NiMH pack does.
Yesterday, my Newt refused to turn on under NiMH power *again*, so I
decided to pull out my multimeter and get the voltage righ off the pack.
It was 5.3V. Grr. I left the Newt without any power overnight.
This morning, I plugged my Newt into the Ac adapter and it, of course,
came back to life. I decided this would be a good time to save my data
and made two card backups. I put my NiMH pack in and it read 5.02V in my
Newton. I let it charge today, and it now reads 5.76V. However, while it
was fastCharging it was as high as 6.3V.
Do I have a problem with my Newton my batteries, or am I just going crazy?
My current crackpot theory is that the batteries are adversley affected by
cold temperatures. It's been around -10c here in Guelph for the past week
or so, and I often carry my Newt around in my large pants pocket (I wear
"Cargo Pants" a lot) where it would be subjected to the cold. I'm now
carrying it either in my inside jacket pocket or my bag. Can an ybattery
gurus shed any light on this?? My battery is now at 5.74V, and I'm about
to go out for the afternoon - I hope it lasts!
-----Victor Rehorst - victor@eddie.cis.uoguelph.ca | victor@torque.net------
---Newton Resources: Ethernet, Newton Cage, NewtonTalk archive, and more!---
--------------- http://eddie.cis.uoguelph.ca/~victor/newton/ ---------------
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