Good Morning:

From what I remember, there is not button battery, and I beleive you have about 5 minutes to swap the battery before the memory is lost. I am not poistive, but I know on the older ones, that this is the case. I have the Treo650 phone/pda, so I have to keep the battery up to receive calls. Hope this helps.

Justin

@SadowskiFamily wrote:

When I first started using the Palm I could switch the battires while out caching and not lose any info. But, now as soon as I remove the battires I lose it all.

I have a Palm III. I switch the batteries quickly, one at a time, and I don’t lose anything. I know with mine the “one at a time” is the key, so there is nearly always a battery in contact.

@Team B Squared wrote:

With my old palm m105, I have this problem with losing data when I change the batteries also. I did some research on the web and found out that there is a problem with the capacitor used for battery backup. There was a flaw in the design. I am not sure if this would be the same issue for your situation or not.

I have a Palm III series that I use for caching… and yes it uses a capacitor just like the Palm m105 to temporarily hold the contents of memory while you change the batteries. I can have my batteries out for at least a couple minutes without losing anything.

So if the capacitor is truly bad, there is nothing that can be done simply (like changing an internal battery) to fix the problem… maybe keeping one AAA battery in while you change the other will keep enough “juice” to the memory so the information in it is not lost?

Sounds like we need to open a “hospital” for these sick units (don’t you have this problem too Anne?) where a capacitorectemy is performed to get them well again. 🙂

@Eclecticpeople wrote:

I have a Palm III. I switch the batteries quickly, one at a time, and I don’t lose anything. I know with mine the “one at a time” is the key, so there is nearly always a battery in contact.

I also had the same problem with my m125 losing data, when I changed the batteries. The above mentioned “one battery at a time” method solved this problem for me as well.

@EnergySaver wrote:

Not having a Palm III, I might not be right on this. But I doubt that “removing one battery at a time”, allows the one remaining battery the ability to provide power to the unit … as I’m assuming that the batteries are in “series”, which means removing one battery breaks the circuit; only if they’re in “parallel” would you still have a completed circuit.

Ron, of course you are correct. I figured you were right about the batteries being in series when I read it, but I pulled out the DMM last night and verified that this is true for the Palm III. From now on, you can answer the hardware questions and I’ll stick to the software ones… deal? 🙂

So replacing one battery at a time definitely just minimizes the time the memory is held up by the capacitor. I don’t know what the charge time of the capacitor is, but you may also want to wait some time between taking out each battery to ensure it gets fully charged (and thus will retain memory for the longest time possible).