Hi all,
I really hope some of you hardware gurus can help me here. After much
looking, I finally found an eMate for my daughter. The seller demoed it at
my office and everything seemed fine. The battery indicator showed a full
charge and didn't dip at all after half an hour of playing around with the
backlight on.
I was pretty excited because the eMate is even cooler in person than in
pictures, and I knew my daughter was going to flip over it.
Almost as soon as I got it home, trouble started. There are basically two
problem areas: (I apologize for the following being so verbose, but I
wanted to describe the symptoms as clearly as I can. Maybe it's because
I've been reading those Sherlock Holmes stories every night on my Newton.)
(1) Lid/hinge problem:
About the 4th or 5th time I opened the lid after getting it home, I heard an
ominous cracking noise. Nothing looked obviously broken, but the hinge,
which had been _very_ stiff before, was now much looser. It's still stiff
enough to hold the lid up at anything between about 45 and 135 degrees, but
once you move it too far forward or back, it just falls down fast. The only
visual clue I can see is that the seam where the front and back plastics of
the lid join at the bottom edge (i.e., the seam that is hidden when the lid
is raised to 90 degrees) looks a little wider and looser on the left side
than the right. There is a little bit of "play" there (you can sort of
squeeze the front and back pieces together a little) that is not present on
the right side. As far as I can tell, it's mainly the back piece that moves
when you squeeze.
I know there has been a lot of discussion lately about an eMate hinge
problem requiring some kind of fix with a washer, but I can't tell from
those descriptions whether that is what I have experienced. Does it sound
like I have to do the washer fix, or is this something else? Could I just
try to crazy glue the plastics back together tight? (What holds that seam
together anyway?) Should I be concerned about this loose lid at all?
(2) Powering on/sleep/battery problem:
This one is hard to describe precisely, but seems more serious. The first
night I had the eMate I played around with it for a long time, and the
battery indicator hardly went down. So I figured I had been lucky enough to
find one that still had a good battery pack. I was happy. (Except for
worrying about the lid crack of course.)
I closed the lid to put it to sleep for the night, unplugged because the
battery seemed almost fully charged. The next day it would not awaken or
boot up. After a few minutes of randomly hitting the reset button and the
power key, it eventually started up -- from the pen alignment screen. After
getting it running, I noticed that the battery indicator was almost down to
empty. I plugged it into the 9W AC adapter and the amber light came on.
Many hours later, the amber light was still on, and the battery indicator
still said very low. Looks like a bad battery pack that won't take a
charge, I thought. However, subsequent charges have seemed to go normally
-- the light turns green after a couple of hours and the battery indicator
reads full, so that particular symptom hasn't repeated.
BUT - every time I leave it sleeping for more than a few seconds, the whole
cycle repeats itself. It won't wake up, after a few tries with the reset
button it eventually reboots -- sometimes from the pen alignment screen and
sometimes just from the normal reboot screen with the "system was restarted
because all power was removed" message -- and the battery indicator reads
almost empty. And this is mere moments after the battery was reading full
and the machine running happily, backlight and all.
All of this would sound to me like a bad battery pack, except that if I
don't put it to sleep, I can sit and use it, unplugged, for hours, even with
the backlight on, and the battery indicator moves only very little. Which
sounds like a not-so-bad battery pack, right?
Tonight I'm going to try leaving it sleeping but plugged in overnight to see
what happens. (I'm not sure what I hope to learn though, since I can't even
come up with a working hypothesis to explain what I've observed so far.)
I've tried the hold-the-reset-button-for-20-seconds thing, but it hasn't
helped. Does anyone have any thoughts about what could be going on, and
what I can do about it?
Maybe I should mention that I have applied the system update that's supposed
to improve power management, but that had no observable effect on this weird
behaviour. Another interesting fact is that I'm fairly sure that the seller
did not have these problems. He said he had had the eMate for a few months
and had only recharged it once. He was selling it because he had given up
trying to get it to communicate with his Win98 box. The reason I tend to
believe him (besides his honest face) is that he actually offered to let me
keep it for a few days and pay him only after I was satisfied that
everything was OK. But because he was a poor student and lives 100 miles
away, I thanked him for being so trusting and just gave him the cash. But
it still seems strange that all these things would go wrong the very day I
bought it.
Thanks for reading this far, and I hope someone can help me. My technical
knowledge is quite shallow, but to anyone who can help me save this eMate, I
offer lifetime support for all your quotation mark and apostrophe questions!
I'm going to go read some more Holmes now to try to beef up my powers of
deduction.
Michael Blazer
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Feb 01 2002 - 16:03:12 EST