PocketMatrix

What are your battery habits? Do you tend to drain the device's battery all the way before recharging it again? If you do, then that's the worst thing you could do for the Li-Ion batteries that a PocketPC uses and it's the fastest way to ruin it's battery. I'm sure that if you've been doing that for 6 months then it would be near death.

I don't know of any way to fix a battery, unless there's just some software or hardware that's running it down, or showing a false value (perhaps the first virus?). What I'd do to determine where the problem really is is turn off all battery warnings and things that turn off the device if the battery is however low. Then just play around with it until the device just shuts down without enough power to keep running. If it's really only 1/16th charged then that shouldn't be more than 10-20 minutes of run time.

The only thing I can think of is to buy a new battery before Sunday just to be on the safe side. I don't know where you can get an @migo battery other than ordering it from urthere and having it shipped.

I hate having to correct your battery diagnoseesese...

A Li-Ion battery will suffer from something called the memory effect if you keep "topping it up". This greatly reduces that battery's lifespan. To sort this, drain the fully several times and recharge it to full capacity. The only was to do this may be to put a small lightbulb on the battery and then charge it up externally, without the PPC switching off the current when it judges it to be full. I've fixed a few batteries this way but I don't warrant what I've done and don't take any responsibilty if you screw it up. In future, only charge a Li-Ion battery when it's close to empty.

A Lithium-Polymer battery can, as Moose pointed out, be damaged by allowing it to drop to empty. This shortens its lifespan. THe best method for those is to charge them up little and often.

Well I kept it plugged in continouously when I wasn't using since it was notiorious for turning on randomly and draining all of the Li-Ion and then killing my backup battery causing me to have to reinstall everything.

So guess I need a new battery...

The Li-Ion Polymer is the one that can be charged whenever you want or need it. It is a great technology to have. The Li-Ion are good also but you do need to keep them conditioned so they keep a good long charge. To do that dont do alot of charging until it gets very low. This goes for both laptops, cell phones, and PDAs. Any other battery solution like Ni-Cad or NMH are like the Li-Ions also.

Well why don't you leave it plugged in, go to the battery screen and see that it says "charging", then with the device still on at the same screen take the power plug out and see what the thing does.

You could make a backup of your files through active sync or onto a storage card then hard reset, that's what I'd do. Make sure that the device works fine after the hard reset, don't restore the back up right away. Then when things are all clear and it works, if it works, restore the backup and see if it starts doing this again. If so, just do a hard reset and learn to make backups more frequently, and send the backup file you have to McAfee's infected files center and tell them it might have a virus that shows that the battery is completely drained. It sounds like it could be the first virus for the PocketPC (TechMarge... ). Good luck, but it's always good to have a second spare battery anyway.

Ok, that fixed it...

Well, thanks for the help everyone.