From: Mort Denison (mdenison_at_blazenet.net)
Date: Sat Aug 19 2000 - 13:07:48 EDT
I have the same problem except with a TP760XD and a Dock II. I bought
another NiMH battery, charged it up and was fine. Except I use the one year
old bad battery in the TP when it's in the Dock II. I suspect being
constantly in the Dock II did the battery in.
Mort Denison
-----Original Message-----
From: Blaine Hufnagle [mailto:powrlftr_at_ix.netcom.com]
Sent: Friday, August 18, 2000 8:30 PM
To: thinkpad_at_cs.utk.edu
Subject: 755CD reliability issues...
I've got a 755CD that's showing some real problems when running on battery
power. I'm trying to determine if I need to throw down the wad of cash I
need for a new battery, or go ahead and upgrade to a 76x-class machine.
Symptoms:
Exceedingly limited battery life; going from fully charged to
blinking-battery-LED before it finishes booting
Reliable battery life less than 15 minutes, even after reconditioning
[These two pretty much say it's a bad battery, but....]
Sometimes when it wants to run for more than 20 minutes or so, it'll
hard-lock; so hard that even the power switch doesn't work. It takes
hitting the reset switch in back to get it to recover.
I realize that the manual's promise of 3-3.5 hours on a charge is highly
unrealistic, but I'd think that 1.5 hours or so would be within reason.
I did have to replace the power board in it. It came with the Li-Ion
capable board, but I replaced it with the NiMH board. Would that give me
any problems on a P-75 machine? I've not had any real problems so far.
Note that it will run flawlessly (or, DID, before I left out last time) for
days when in a Dock-II.
I'm running WinNT4, SP-6a. Are there any OS issues I should attempt to
address? Running NT4 so far has resulted in fairly reliable use, and at
one time I was getting two weeks or more of stability with multiple
suspend/resume cycles per day.
We bought a copy of Open Source Linux to try on it, but I'm concerned about
power management under Linux, and since this machine sees stationary usage
once every three months or so, power management is critical.
This machine runs in a high-vibration environment, and has been subjected
to multiple drops from table-top height, albeit onto a padded floor. I did
discover last week that one of the tiny screws in the CD-ROM drive had come
out and was running loose inside the machine. I extracted it, but it's
still having problems. I was thinking that maybe something had gotten
shorted, but it seems to behave itself otherwise, and always passes POST.
The machine has been remarkably reliable otherwise, especially considering
the abuse I give it. What is making me think about upgrading is that most
of the few websites I visit regularly have long-since gone to an 800x600
format, and the 640x480 screen of the 755CD is not quite big enough any
more. Also worth considering is that while Win2K will load and boot on the
machine without incident, it's phenomenally slow, and as such is useless.
About all I do on this machine is check e-mail and light-duty web browsing.
I do use Excel to run a couple of business spreadsheets to keep track of
my mileages. But, nothing that's heavily processor intensive. I was
thinking about seeing if I could find a 760-series with a P-133 or so. My
problem with the newer machines is the blasted "wrist rest." My hands are
big enough that the wrist rest makes touch-typing almost impossible.
Anyone got a 760 they'd be willing to part with, CHEAP?
ObPersonal to Bill Morrow: How's the freight business?
-blaine
The Zen Method of Big Rig: Grasshopper, truck will shift itself if you are
one with it.- Bill Keith (Cruising the Info-Bahn in a Freightliner dry van
:-)
DoD #7192 (but no bike) Powerlifting LIFE - The rest is details.
http://www.powerbear.com
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