Sunday, March 11, 2007

Palm Pilot batteries and hard reset

Try a hard reset on your Palm Pilot if the battery does not hold a (full) charge.

Last week I was away for 6 days with my Tungsten T5 running off its battery. Had my appointments, contacts, an alarm clock (World Clock) and played Suduku once a day. No problem -- returned home with a 50% battery charge.

Plugged the Palm into my computer and power strip when I got home to charge it up. Synchronized the Palm with the desktop without a problem. Then I downloaded the Daylight Savings Time Update for Palm OS. I didn't read down on the directions about resetting your device... at least the first time.

Later the Palm alerted me that the battery was dangerously low and should be plugged in to charge. It was plugged in - to my computer and power strip. Then I tried charging the Palm on the outlet in the bathroom – without any success.

I bought the extended 2 year warranty; it ended in January 2007. No comment. Not really relevant.

I called Palm tech support for help. I asked if there was anything I could try to get the battery to hold a charge. Sorry, no. Steve told me that it would cost $199 to replace the battery, and for that money I might want to buy a new Palm. Palm would give me 20% off the price of a Z22 ($99 USD), E2 ($199USD), T|X ($229 USD) or LifeDrive ($399 USD) from the Palm site. Steve gave me as special upgrade code.

Before replacing the T5, I had to do some troubleshooting on my own.
  • A Soft Reset brought the Palm back to life. Excellent! But the battery would only charge 50%. Not satisfactory.
  • I had synced the Palm with my desktop, so decided to try a Hard Reset. Erased everything and went back to the factory default settings. Synchronizing bought everything back to the Palm just like it had been. And the battery is now charged 100%.
Now that the battery is fully charged, I applied the DST updater. Seems fine.

Tomorrow I'll check to see if there are any other updates needed.

Resetting your device in a variety of ways:
http://www.palm.com/cgi-bin/cso_kbURL.cgi?ID=887
Palm DST updater:
http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/dst_palmos.html

1 comment:

fatima said...

hmmm nice informative post thanks for shearing.
Palm Pilot