Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@schestowitz.com> wrote:
>I still doubt the ability of pen strokes to bring the battery to complete
>drainage... the Palm unit would insist on 'going to sleep'
I dunno if the pen strokes work for sure, I've never tried them.
But you can kill the battery with software. For example the Palm m5xx series had
a problem with static discharge. One accidental zap and it would scramble the
data that ran the PDA's USB port. You could still hotsync using a serial port
cable (which you had to go out and buy and was much slower), but you could no
longer hotsync with the USB cable that came with the unit. The only fix was to
completely kill the battery. Palm's official fix was to send you a SD card with
a program on it that killed the battery. Many chose to open the unit and
disconnect the battery to avoid damage. (Killing a LI battery is bad for it
according to many sources.) And the part that sucked was that if you
accidentally zapped it again, the problem was back again.
>The unit is programmed to avoid data damage even if
> it is _exactly_ what you wish to do.
Yes, a PDA is programmed to save the data if the battery goes too low, but like
most computers you can work around it. However killing the battery will only
work with PDAs using volatile memory. Not with PDAs using *non-volatile* memory
like the T5, TE2 and Lifedrive. If they should succumb to a similar data
scramble problem what then? Killing the battery won't work. How would you fix
them? Are you SOL? Is it a trip back to Palm? I'm waiting for the first example
to be along shortly... ;)
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