New Finds Brings New Needs...

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Wed Aug 16 11:14:15 2000

ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
> You'll probably find the battery in the Portable+ is very dead. It's a
> 6V 2.4Ah lead acid brick, and it's non-trivial to obtain. 3 2.5Ah cyclons
> can be kludged into the battery compartment -- in fact it appears that
> the original HP battery was just that. Changing the battery is not easy
> even with the service manual -- if you follow the procedure there you're
> supposed to replace the metal contact straps as well, and they do tend to
> break fairly easily. I find it better to pull the machine to bits and
> take the battery out after separating the case parts.

Huh. You mean you're not supposed to take the machine to bits to
replace the battery? I learn something new every day. (But really I
take freshly-acquired Pluses to bits because it makes cleaning them
easier.)

I seem to find two sorts of Portable Plus: one with the Panasonic
lead-acid brick, and one with three Gates lead-acid cells. The former
don't hold a charge, the latter are somewhat more likely to do so.
iGo sell replacements; these turn out to be made by Fedco Electronics
from three Gates lead-acid cells and at least one of the two I got a
couple months ago appears to be a dud that won't charge up above about
3v. More on this in a bit.

> The machine will run from the mains adapter without a battery (or with a
> dead battery?) but you'll lose everything in the RAMdisk (and the
> configuration settings) when you unplug the machine. Can I assume you
> don't have a 9114 disk drive (which is the normal form of mass storage
> for these machines)?

Whether the machine will run from the main adapter appears to depend
on how dead the battery is, or perhaps on how the battery is dead.
For example, the last couple I've turned up have worked OK from the
mains adapter but wouldn't hold a charge and wouldn't retain data with
the mains adapter unplugged. But...replacing a dead Panasonic brick
with one of the iGo/Fedco batteries has resulted in a machine that
won't turn on at all -- presumably because the battery is drawing the
supply and not leaving enough for the machine to run.

So I'm wondering what I'm looking at here: cells that have been left
on the shelf long enough that they've shorted internally, or what?
Sheesh, given that iGo/Fedco cleverly omit the screw posts from their
replacement batteries, I might as well buy my own cells and solder the
appropriate tabs together.

-Frank McConnell
Received on Wed Aug 16 2000 - 11:14:15 BST