Z's dead baby

[iamasmith]

Hi,

Got up today after having spent the last few days quite laid up with flu or something like it and decided that I could manage some work from home so I dug out my Z which I hadn't powered on for about 4 days (you know it was bad!) to get a list of whitepapers that I needed to write and when I hit the power button I got nothing.....    

Stuck the power cable in and still got nothing, eventually after about 5 mins I started to get some speccling of the LCD but no actual life (or backlight) but then I thought I remembered something about the Z always running on battery unless running in the service menus so I decided to give it a bit longer.

Eventually everything seemed to recover. Now none of that seems remarkable - simply out of juice (although I would have thought that there was enough standby juice for quite a while). The remarkable thing was that when the Z came back on it was prompting for time/date based upon something around yesterday lunchtime and I know that Qtopia ROMs store this information upon shutdown. So I was wondering if anyone knows what the dieing throws of an 860 running Cacko 1.21b are ?

Does it indeed wake itself up with it's last bit of strength to do an orderly shutdown ? If so this is better news for the inbuilt apps than I had previously hoped for.

Also given that the battery had gone from about 20% to absolutely zilch in four days of standby is it feasible that the unit decided that it was just going to dump the charge for a fresh charging cycle (sort of critical battery conditioning) or is it more likely that something woke up the Z and wouldn't let it sleep. - From my past experience I can get away with not charging for a whole week sometimes and experience less than 50% drop with quite a lot of use. - It would be good if someone could say why it may normally lose the bottom 20% during percieved standby.

I would like to find out if this is all expected behaviour, I wouldn't like to find my Z unexpectedly doing this on a frequent basis.

- Andy

[Chaos]

Yes, probably just the battery dying...

The batteries on Zauri sometimes drop rather rapidly after getting to a certain point. Also, unless this differs on the C-series, the battery meter is not incredibly accurate (showing 100, 75, 50, 25, 10 and 5 %s only), possibly meaning you had less battery than you thought.

And as far as I know the time is stored whenever the Zaurus is shutdown, improperly or otherwise, in the newer models (non-5000/5500).

[hoopera]

Hi

I get this on occasion with the Cacko 1.21b ROM, I suspect that it is using the back power button to shut it down. Using the suspend option from the menu appears to solve the problem. Also if you forget to turn it off and the unit goes to sleep then the battry will allways be flat when turned back on.

Andrew Hooper
Freelance Network Services

[iamasmith]

I actually had occsasion to flatten the battery again a few weeks ago when I got my WiFI card and didn't realise quite how quickly it would suck the juice.

When the power on the Z gets low enough you get to a state when you can power on but the Z immediately powers back off. Following a charge you can see dmesg output that says something like 'critical - suspending'.

I'm not worried about this any more, my Z behaves predictably and that's all you can ask.