Battery draining

I have had my clip for about 2-3 years and am very happy with it; but recently I charge it fully and it drains when it is powered off.  I have formatted it; ran firmware and reset still same problem.  Does anyone know anything else I can do or am I gonna have to buy a new one :cry: or can I replace the battery

Thanks

After a few years of regular use, the battery in a Clip, clip+, or Clip Zip will wear out. While it is possible to change the battery, it is not easy to open the player without damaging it, and it is not so easy to find a decent capacity battery that will fit in it for a low price(perhaps you might need to order it from China), and not easy to solder the battery in place. I suggest that you replace the player. The good news is that if you are in the US, Radio Shack is selling the 4GB Clip+(the model after your Clip which has an SDHC card slot) for just $30 this week. Even if you could change the battery in your Clip, the effort will be more than $30 of your time, and you also have to track down a replacement battery, pay for it, and risk breaking the player while installing it. You will also need a small soldering iron, and to be skilled in soldering. Besides which, after around 3 years of regular use the buttons may be very worn, and some of the other components in the player might break soon enough. I read about a few people who changed the battery as a challenge to see if they could do it, however the value of time involved and the cost of the replacement battery exceeded the price of a replacement player.

My battery on two of my 3 clips is draining ridiculously fast.  I didn’t have an issue until I installed the newest firmware on the Clip+ and now it is happening w/ both of them.  I charge them to 100% and within a couple of hours of sitting turned off, the battery will be at 50%.  I repeat, they aren’t being used and the battery just drains out! = VERY ANNOYING!

The one that still works fine is my old clip w/o the + and doesn’t have a new firmware.

Has anyone else experienced this?  I reset them to factory setting; didn’t work.  I went in and manually set the settings to use the least power; no help either.

I thank you in advance for your thoughtful responses…and yes I spent a few minutes searching for ideas.

That is most definitely an odd situation.  Other than running a different codec or media format, which will affect power consumption a little bit, I’ve never isolated a specific firmware build to notably increased power consumption, with only one  exception, the Sansa View  model.  This player had a complex chipset and was finicky in standby / off mode.

Is this case you mention “the Clip w/o the +”, are you referring to one Clip  (round button and ring) and two newer Clip+ (squared device control and microSD slot) machines?

If they are Clip+ models, make a quick comparison by removing the microSD cards from them and retest if the battery life changes.  Additionally, you can revert to one of the earlier firmware builds to compare (just use the search box above, enter “Clip+ firmware” and you should get a list.  

The laws of distribution (mathematical statistics) show that if you have a failure, they will tend to happen in clusters, one of the few things where Murphy’s Law matches statistics.  It’s unlikely that the firmware is the issue, but it is a common thread in your experience.

If the battery itself is the problem, this is covered under the original warranty (1 year US, two years EU).

Bob  :wink:

I’d try reapplying the latest firmware–perhaps the firmware has become corrupted.