Some time back a member of this list received an eMate that -
a) sat out on his stoop(?) and got damp
b) seemed to not be able to get good life out of the battery.
At the time it rang a bell, just not a very loud one. I just received my
first (personally owned) eMate yesterday (THANKS Ralph !!!), and it
exhibited the exact same problem. After digging through my notes of previous
odd/unusual repairs (aka 'problem children'), here is a potential solution
(bear with me).
The story:
When the eMate was brand new from Apple, one ended up in the hands of a
friend who let it set for about two weeks after setting the backlight to
stay on always and never sleep (oops). He went out of town and forgot to
close it or turn it off. After much research, and a call to Apple, it
turned out that the eMate had a problem with prolonged deep power loss. The
Apple tech sent me a little 'utility' he had that basically reset the power
management circuitry to correctly recognize and charge the NiMh pack. I
have since lost it, but there is now a better utility out there that works.
The fix:
a) If you have data on the unit back it up.
b) Remove NIc, flash, or modem cards (internal update is OK)
c) Do a hard reset and say yes to erase (aka Brainwipe).
d) Using Dock & NCU, install in following order.
1) Latest sytem patch : (will require restart)
http://www.unna.org/unna/apple/system_patches/english/eMate/EM737246.PKG
2) Nicks SoftCharge :
http://www.logictools.de/newton/freeware/softcharge/softcharge.sit.hqx
e) Exit Dock, open Extras, then open Prefs.
f) Select Battery type, then select NiMh.
g) Exit out to your backdrop and power cycle the unit.
h) Allow unit to fully charge, then use on battery until warning.
i) Step 'h' may need to be repeated - YMMV.
The result:
I started out getting about 5-10 minutes from a "fully charged" battery even
after three successive charge/discharge cycles. Now, my eMate has been on
non-stop for an hour on batteries and still shows 100% capacity both in
Avi's backdrop and via the built-in ways of checking.
I hope this proves helpful to someone else ! Thanks for the Bandwidth !
Paul Nuernberger
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