Battery bad? Charge lite flashes

[mp2100zaurus]

One of my rechargeable batteries seems bad.  What does it mean when the battery LED flashes when the Z in in its cradle?  The Z does die quickly when I turn it on (hadn\'t backed it up for a month, darn it), so I guess my own answer is, the battery is bad.

So, it\'s rated at 3.7 volts, my multimeter reads 3.6 volts, that seems reasonable to me.

OK, by spare battery reads 4.18 volts, and it works fine.  But still 3.6 volts doesn\'t sound \"bad\".

[V-Man]

Sounds like your battery is dying.  3.7 volts is the nominal voltage.  I don\'t have specs on hand for lithium batteries, but for nickel metal hydride:  nominal voltage 1.2v, voltage when fully charged was something around 1.4v, voltage when completely drained was approximately 1.1v.  With a battery, the voltage changes as the charge changes.  

V-man

[Anonymous]

clean the battery contacts. I experienced a similar failure but once I cleaned the contacts everything came back to normal. Good luck!

[mp2100zaurus]

It doesn\'t explain it, maybe the contacts *were* dirty, but:

I put my spare, good, battery in, ran the Z for a few minutes.  Then I put the dead, bad, battery back in, and put it into the cradle immediately.  The charge lite came on!  It did charge, but I\'m not going to trust the battery very much until it proves itself.

Oh, and IIRC, the bad battery died when I was WiFi-ing after the Z warned me to shut down soon.  I should\'ve heeded the advice.  I suppose the voltage dropped too far on one of the cells.