Hi Jim, Carol, Paul and others, Jim, you wrote that the default internal microphone recording level of 12 doesn't work for you and you'd have to set it to 9 or lower to get anything intelligible. I find that too (and I have no network card inserted in the mPower that might interfere). It's not even a matter of inferior sound quality, there's just hardly any sound at all; if I made a five second recording there might be a one second crackle toward the end of the recording but that would be all. So I keep it at eight or nine.
It's kind of a relief to read other people's experience with the mPower regarding battery behaviour and service resets. Apparently it's not my unit being faulty but it's a bit more common in these members of the BN family. I'm not a technical person at all but I tried to find some sort of pattern in the chain of events that might lead to a lock-up that could only be remedied by doing a service reset (at some point I was at an average of one service reset a day and felt this might harm the unit since this type of reset is supposed to be the last thing to do, under strict technical supervision). So far I haven't figured it out. Whether I have any cards inserted or not doesn't seem to make a difference and it doesn't seem to be the time it has been turned off that causes it to freeze like that. A few things I try to do is make sure to return to the main menu before turning the unit off or leaving it on and unattended for a while (it will usually go into hibernation mode then) and do a re set or plug in the ac adapter before I turn it off for the night. Call it superstition but it seems to help. As for the battery, I recalibrated it once and it took about eight hours to discharge. About a week ago when I charged it I noticed it went to 92% and claimed it was fully charged. I unplugged the adapter then plugged it back in and after a few seconds it said it was fast charging again (which it claimed it was still doing when the battery power report had been at 100% for maybe half a minute). Shouldn't it have said trickle charging? Anyway, it went to 100% as it should and I must add it usually does. I also find that once it's under 10% you never know when it will turn itself off. The first few times I did not get the "critical" message but now I do. It still seems to go out at around 8% or 6% though. Another thing I noticed is that the manual doesn't seem to cover all the support information mode options. One that isn't covered (unless I missed it) is the i option which used to be something like battery inaccuracy count and is now battery cycle count. Before the value was reset after a recalibration either a deliberate one or as a result of using the unit until it goes flat. Now the value seems to go up and does not go back to one. At first this surprised me because I hadn't noticed the change of the name of this option. Now I guess it's just how it's supposed to be. Thanks for reassuring me that this unit is not the only one experiencing these things; I was afraid this machine might quit some day and I'd have to return it (which I definitely do not want to do!) but now I feel confident that it's nothing serious, just....different. *smile* Have a great day everybody. Kind regards, Ilona.
