HP 95LX - Page 131

Normally, when the main battery gets low, the HP 95LX will beep at you, flash a
quick message (that disappears rapidly) and turn itself off. If you turn it back on,
it will flash the message, and turn itself off again. Don’t panic! Check to be sure
that the backup battery is healthy (make sure no BACKUP BATTERY LOW
message is showing), then change the main batteries; everything will be normal
once again.* Don’t put this off—the backup battery is designed to work like the
“bubble-gum” spare tire on your car: it’s just functional enough to get you to the
service station where you can get the regular tire fixed.
Occasionally, you will see that your main batteries are draining faster than they
customarily do. Often, this is because you have been using your serial communi-
cations port frequently—with the Connectivity Pack for printing, or with a modem.
The serial port is powered up automatically each time you enter either the Filer
or the DataComm applications. Leaving these applications open unnecessarily
will drain your batteries faster than normal.
Also, occasionally a DOS program you've run will power up the serial port and then
fail to turn it off again when it’s finished—thereby draining your batteries faster
than desired. Other DOS programs may simply expect the serial port to be
powered up already—asit usually is on a desktop PC. In those cases, you will have
to turn it on “manually.” A special DOS command has been included in the HP
95LX just to control the power to the serial port: Ser ctl #0 turns it off:
serctl “wturnsiton.
If you find yourself having problems with the serial port being on too much, you
might construct a one-line batch file containing the S&t"Ct. 1 ~0command that
you can execute from the Filer when you need it.
*Some early units had a problem with the way this procedure worked: When the main battery gets
low on one of the afflicted units, the system will beep, but the beep ends up draining the rest of the
battery. If you replace the batteries, the system undergoes a warm restart—which it doesn’t
normally do when you replace the batteries. If you machine is behaving like this, contact HP
Corvallis Service Center (503) 757-2002.
Avoiding Data Loss 131