My iPaq is a piece of iCrap

[tmulli]

Exactly one year to the day, my iPaq battery seems to have gone ka-put. It was fully charged before I left for the weekend and when I came into work Monday morning and plopped it into the cradle, it was dead. "It appears you fully discharged the battery". Yeah right, like I wanted to do that. Thanks for the ambiguous alert, you british git. So I fully recharged and restored from backup (albeit a few weeks old - alright, I'm not the most diligent about my backups) and then re-synced. Some 400 billion items not synchronized - would you like to combine or replace? Combine as usual. Oh, it appears you have duplicate items, would you like to delete the dups? Why yes, lets. Ok deleted the dups and now you have doubles. HHmmmm...Delete the dups and resync. Cannot add items blah, blah & blah. Ok, so delete the offending items. SYnc again, looks good. Go home, enjopy nice evening with family. Next day come to work, "The battery is low, you should charge to avoide data loss". Oh really? I better do that. Charge and sync, GO!! Oops, something somwhere referenced memory 0x0347493474594574594584504358 and cannot continue. Turns out to be ActiveSink. So now my battery cannot hold a charge, my data is screwy, ActiveSink doesn't work like usual and I am *just* out of my warranty period. Thanks HP/Compaq. And since my iCrap is a 3955, I can't replace the battery. No way in hell am I sending it to HP. 1) Not paying for it, 2) I've heard the horror stories.

So...up the sh*t crick without a paddle. I always wanted a $500.00 paper weight. And just in time for Christmas. HP, you shouldn't have!!

[Janak Parekh]

I can understand your frustration, but this is the exception, not the rule. My old 3870's battery is slowly fading, but it's over two years old and still holds a decent charge. And ActiveSync isn't HP's fault per se.

If it's really, exactly one year to the day, I'd call up HP and see if I can try and get warranty repair -- that's truly a borderline case. If you really don't want to, you can get an aftermarket battery from Pocket PC Techs (http://www.pocketpctechs.com/i3800diykit.asp). They give you tools and instructions to make the battery replacement relatively straightforward.

--janak

[PetiteFlower]

Of course fully discharging the battery could have caused it to die, especially since it was already old, that could have been the push it needed to go bad. A weekend is a little short for it to have been expected to go dead(unless something was running on it of course), but usually batteries don't go out all at once like that.

I wouldn't be surprised if HP would be willing to honor your warantee though. Never hurts to try.

[tmulli]

I was just ranting and venting. At the moment seems to be working again. Not sure what was with the battery, but I am watching/testing it to monitor drain. AS issue was a problem with my Outlook file - got stuck.

Janak - Thanks for the link to PPC Techs. May use it if battery is in fact worn out.

[timbur]

Thanks for the ambiguous alert, you british git.

Maybe I'm suffering from a SOH failure but I'd be grateful if you could retract that comment. :|

[dmy]

... restored from backup (albeit a few weeks old - alright, I'm not the most diligent about my backups)

And how many other people out there besides me just went to another window and started a backup on their PPC??

D.

[PetiteFlower]

Not me, mine backs up automatically every time I cradle it.