Zen Sleek not charging properly and battery not holding cha

Question

Hi everyone. My Sleek has the latest firmware and is about 4 months old. I've searched for any info regarding my specific problem but can't find any. The problem is that the player won't charge. I plug in the charger and the charging sign shows. This quickly - in less than a minute I think - changes to the plug sign, suggesting?that the player is fully charged. I turn off the charger and the battery strength goes down to 0 or bar immediately and if I try playing it, it very quickly gives up and either switches itself off or, more often, freezes. When I plug the charger back in, the player usually has to rebuild the library before I can play anything. I've tried leaving the player switched on with idle shutdown turned off. When I do this, the fully charged sign disappears after a bit and the battery looks like it's charging for a short period of time before the charged sign comes back, but the result is the same. I've even tried doing?this overnight but with no joy. As I type, I'm trying to charge the player via a USB port. It looks like it's charging for about 30 secs, then the charged sign comes up, then it goes away and I'm left with 2 bars. Unplugging the player leaves me with no bars again. Also, the number of bars has in the past seemed to change randomly - 0 bars, then 2 bars, then bar etc. And it's gone from 2 bars to 'Low battery' and switching itself off without any inbetween stage. I've done a disk clean quite a few times with no joy. I had the same problem a few months ago and I tried all the above things and then it just seemed to randomly sort itself. So I stuck. Any suggestions would be gratefully received!?Thanks, Martin.

Answer 1

Did you try just leaving the player plugged in the to charger regardless of what the charging sign indicated?The problem you describe is a quite common characteristic of lithium batteries when they have done a few hundred charging cycles and are left to run very low or empty on charge. There is some quite convincing evidence that unlike using ni-cad or ni-mh batteries, we should not fully empty lithium batteries and that regular top-up charges are better for them. The player's charging circuit basically cycles between charging and testing the battery's output voltage. So after the 30 seconds to minute you describe the player stops accepting charge and tests the voltage from the battery. When lithium batteries have been charged for a short time from empty, the voltage they show to the test is almost what the charging voltage was, so it stops charging believing the battery to be full. Some charging circuits give up then, especially those that can't trickle charge (applying a small current to keep the battery topped up but not charging) to protect the battery. So basically you did the right thing to revi've the battery, but maybe for the next few cycles, just leave it til it gets to 30-50% before recharging. Hope that helps in some way