CF Expansion Pack Plus Battery Problem

[Dazbot]

I have had an CF Expansion Pack Plus (with slim battery) jacket since July last year, i also bought a 256MB CF card at the same time. Im using it with a iPaq 3850.

Round about October/November I started getting low battery warnings, i charge both batteries every night, and leave it connected during the night, on this occasion I didn't charge during the night, the next morning I got a low battery warning on the external battery, when i got home i placed it on the charger. Since then i have had low battery warnings at least serveral times a week, even with playing MP3s, using my D-Link DCF-660W 802.11b CF card it takes only half an hour or so to discharge.

If I remove the battery and use the internal battery it lasts a lot longer before giving me an error.

I need to get this fixed but HP say there is nothing wrong, its using unnecessary charging cycles of the internal battery to charge the external battery. I don't want to change my internal battery just cause it can't be recharged anymore.

Is this normal?

HP support seem to think it is. They said the external battery is tiny compared to the ipaqs internal one. How much difference is there?

Darren

[Dazbot]

I tried testing how long it took for each battery to discharge.

After 27mins of using my DCF-660W wireless card with the screen on and streaming MP3s from my deskop:

with the expansion pack battery - it dropped by 40% the internal ipaq battery stayed at 100%
without the expansion pack battery - the internal ipaq battery dropped by 10%

This can't be normal?

How much smaller is the expansion pack battery? i thought they were almost the same, 1000mAh for the ipaq battery and 920mAh for the expansion pack battery.

HP say it is.... :evil:

[Janak Parekh]

Are you running the latest ROM, or at least the driver bundled with the CF+ sleeve? The old ROMs couldn't handle the expansion pack properly. The new ones give an "Expansion Pack Battery Low" warning.

The internal battery, btw, is 1400mah, and more importantly, I've found that the external battery draining first to be normal behavior. It certainly does take me more than 27 minutes, though.

--janak

[Dazbot]

It hasn't always been like this, it used to last much longer before october last year.

Would 480mAH less make the external battery discharge that much faster?

I installed the update from the cd that came with the jacket, and more recentally applied EUU3, I didn't have any other updates on it including previous EUUs except for the scratch noise fix.

I haven't had any other problems with my ipaq and jacket except for the odd occasion when it lost my memory card which returned after a soft reset. The first time that happened i had just gone through the airport security, is the cf card not been found problem linked to this? Or is it just a coincidence?

However sometimes the internal battery would start to discharge first, expecially while it was turned off. And does it always take so long to display the battery status for the external battery? It can take upto 10secs to display it. The internal battery status is displayed immediately.

[snappy2515]

I own a Compaq IPaq 3765 with the CF plus expansion pack constantly on the IPaq and the internal battery drains before the expansion pack battery. I get the warning when the internal battery is at 50% and the expansion pack battery is reading that it is fully charged......I thought that the expansion pack was suppose to charge the internal battery :?

[Janak Parekh]

And does it always take so long to display the battery status for the external battery? It can take upto 10secs to display it. The internal battery status is displayed immediately.
This is correct behavior - the external battery doesn't have the precise reporting capability that the internal batteries on the 38xx do.

Re the ROM - are you running v1.20? It embeds the drivers within the ROM, so you don't need to install the CD (and you probably shouldn't). If you're not, consider running it (but this will require a hard reset, and like you said, it used to work well).

Otherwise, I'm sorry to say that it sounds like your battery may be going bad. :(

--janak

[Dazbot]

How do I tell HP that its gone bad, they don't believe me :evil:

I have only got the 1.15.04 ROM, i don't fancy hard resetting cause everything else is fine

I do have a stuck WINS server address in my DCF-660W card config, which was updated to a new version and added a new card config, under vxUtil i now have two:

the old dcf-660w1 with the wins server address that won't delete
the new prismnds1 card that the new Dlink drivers install.

How do i remove the old one or the wins server address completely? other than a hard reset?

[Janak Parekh]

How do I tell HP that its gone bad, they don't believe me :evil:
No idea. Keep on calling until a rep believes you?

How do i remove the old one or the wins server address completely? other than a hard reset?
You might have to use a registry editor and hunt for the WINS address in the registry -- it should be in there, although I don't know exactly where on WinCE devices.

--janak

[Dazbot]

You might have to use a registry editor and hunt for the WINS address in the registry -- it should be in there, although I don't know exactly where on WinCE devices.


Now why didn't I think of that, its in HKEY_Local_Machine/Comm under the adaptor name

[Dazbot]

OK, I finally decided to do a hard reset, but it hasn't made any difference to the extended battery run time. Batteries warrenty expires in a month or so.

After doing the rom 1.20 upgrade my EUU3 update had been removed, is this suppose to happen?

Also when the device is switched off the internal battery discharges first, leaving the extended battery at full charge, although it doesn't do this when I'm using it.

Out of curiosity, after charging the battery up, I only used it for a few minutes over about 20 hours, after which the battery had dropped by 6%, for an iPAQ 3850 thats 15 months old is that any good? Ignoring the external battery that didn't move at all.

I've never let the battery discharge below 45%, the CF Plus Pack + battery is almost always connected.