Troubling enabling external battery pack

[joewilliams]

Last week I went on a business trip (to the Toronto filmfest) with my Genio 550G. Instead of taking the AC adapter, I took an external battery pack I bought on eBay. It seeemed pretty straighforward--it uses 4 AA batteries, connects to the AC jack on the Genio and has an on/off switch (with activation light). For the first two minutes that the external battery unit was plugged in and turned on, the Genio's Power screen displayed the animation that the unit was charging. Then it quickly reverted to the percentage meter, which was draining. I tried plugging and unplugging the battery pack repeatedly but got the same result, until the internal battery ran down to 10% and I feared losing data. The external pack never did power the unit nor charge the internal battery.

So here's the question: In lieu of chucking the unit as defective, is there something I'm supposed to check or change to enable external battery pack power? (There is a check box on the Power screen that says "Enable main battery charges second battery," but it doesn't accept a checkmark and doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for.)

Can anybody offer any hints or experience about enabling external battery packs?

Joe Williams

[korngold]

Joe,

I'm sorry I can't offer advice, but if there's a solution, I'd like to hear. I bought a unit with a "travel charger" a while back, and the same thing happened. It lit up, I checked the battery meter, which showed that it was charging, so I left it for a while & listened to some tunes. I removed the adapter and checked the meter about 20 minutes later, and my battery had drained from 80% (when plugged in) to 50%. So, needless to say, I haven't used that thing since.

My guess was that the center of the adapter's plug was too large in diameter, and not making contact with the pin in the center of the PDA's charging jack. And, somehow, when a plug is plugged into the PDA, the unit automatically assumes that it's charging, even though the center contact isn't making contact at all. However, this whole theory is just pure speculation. 8O

[webcash]

Yhis may be a total duff answer but here goes anyways.I had a simialir problem on a sony TH55 with the official Sony TH55 battery pack charger.Turned out that as i was using rechargables they were not sufficient to drive the charge needed to charge the main battery.I got higher rated ones and bingo perfect.However if you are simply using ordinary batteries then all that will be totall pointless

HTH

Peter