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A word of caution with the sync/charge cables. These cables may not be all they are cracked up to be. Here is a post from a different group, and I think there is also some mention of it in the Dell Forums. I have a Dell Inspiron Laptop, and the USB voltage is marginal at best.
repost:
Sync & Charge Drains Battery
I am having a little issue with how my Gomadic sync and charge cable is working, and thought I would share it with you.
When I first got the cable it seemed to be working normally, but I had never let the battery get down lower than 80% or so before plugging it back in.
After a weekend of high wifi usage the battery was down in the 40-50% range, and I plugged in the sync and charge. For some reason I went to the battery meter to check it out, and it was showing that it was discharching at about 1% a second.
I then tried out my other battery, that was at about 98%, and it charged normally.
I put the discharged one back in and hooked it up to the dell cradle, and it began to charge normally. So I finished charging it up to 100%.
I then tried that battery again on the s&c cable, and it began to discharge. Removing the cable showed a steady climb back to fully charged.
I emailed gomadic, and they replied promptly, with the following:
"We have been running in to this problem some recently. Basically, the Dell
requires 5.4 volts of dc power and the USB port puts of 5.0. There is
always a +/- 10% buffer with these things, so it will work, but we're on the
edge a little. What we think is happening is that once you get below a
certain percentage of charge, the Axim tries to pull more power than the USB
port on some computers can put off resulting in it not charging anymore.
Things that you can do to mitigate this behavior is to turn off the Dell
while charging in order to re-establish a battery base above the required
threshold, minimize the use of other USB devices on the same port (if using
a hub), or turn down some of the power demanding components of the dell such
as the backlight settings on the screen.
If this is too much of an inconvenience for you and you determine that the
cable does not fit your needs, you may send it back at anytime for a full
refund.
Thanks,
gomadic"
So next time the battery was low, what I did was plug in the sync and charge then turn the ax off and let it charge a while. It charged to 100%. Then I turned the screen brightness down a couple of notches (it was set at 100% when connected to external power), and it doesn't discharge anymore.
I hope this helps anyone who runs into this problem.
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