49g+ lithium battery

[troy]

About a month ago, I upgraded from a 49 to a 49g+. ALREADY, I have a warning for a low battery(s). I changed the alkaline batteries and still get the warning. This leads me to believe that the lithium battery is dead or dying. Is this a normal battery life? I have been using the calculator heavily in the past month, but it seems that the battery life should be longer than this. Any suggestions?

[James M. Prange (Michigan)]

The ROM in the very early units had a bug that used up the batteries much faster than expected, in particular drawing significant current even with the calculator turned off.

If your 49g+ ROM version is less than 1.23, download the latest ROM from HP's web site.

Well, they say that the real bug was that the processor supplier made a change without informing them, but I'd say the the bug involved not thoroughly testing that the very first production units actually worked as expected. What were they thinking?

I would hope that the 49g+ would draw current from the backup battery only when the AAA batteries were low or removed.

Did you check the batteries before putting them in? It's rare, but a brand new battery can be bad.

Of course the battery life depends on a lot how you use it.
Writing to the flash and I/O take a lot of power. In general, the 49g+ seems to go through batteries faster than previous models.

Regards,
James

Edited: 15 Apr 2004, 12:47 p.m.