OT? Nickel Metal Hydrids

[Mark Tapley]

At 18:58 -0600 1/17/05, Dwight wrote:
>Hi
>  I thought I'd pass on some info about these batteries.
>I received a laptop with a "dead" battery. The voltage
>as read from a meter was "0" volts. I mean dead!
>I first stuck it into the laptop but quickly noticed
>the smell of hot resistors ( bad idea ).

I second the "bad idea" notation. I have had one (count it) one 
failure on a heavily used Powerbook 3400 I've had as my primary 
computer since they first came out (about 6 years, extensive airline 
travel, etc.)

That was when I took a discharged NiMH battery (had been on the shelf 
for 3-4 years), put it into the machine with the machine plugged in, 
and ran the battery-cycling program Apple offered for the 5300 and 
3400.
Battery started to charge (maybe 20 seconds), I pulled wall power (as 
instructed), machine went down hard with an ugly noise and stayed 
down until it got a new power supply board. I didn't see the old one, 
but I'm morally certain the escape of some magic smoke was involved.

Since then I've been very very careful to deal with near-dead NiMH 
batteries using a non-critical piece of hardware, rather than a 
built-in charger.

However, same laptop and same battery are still giving good service 
(my secondary machine, now) so I guess I second the below as well.

>  Moral of the story, don't give up on these batteries.
>They are remarkably tough. Most NiCads batteries would
>not recover from such a level.
>Dwight
>

-- 
					- Mark
			210-522-6025, temporary cell 240-375-2995