If you were a fly on the wall of our support emails, you would hear our team suggesting that a customer pull the battery out of their Zebra mobile computer for 30 minutes, and then power it back up to see if the problem went away. Seems like crazy talk, doesn’t it? But many times, it does solve the problem.
What is the science behind that? Well for decades now, mobile devices would have some sort of battery back up beyond the main battery. This alleviates the need to completely reprogram your device every time that you change out the battery. The backup power source keeps the volatile memory alive while you change the battery. It used to be that this back up power was provided by a very small, button sized battery inside the device. The problem was that after a few years this back up battery would fail, and it was not always an easy swap to replace. You could end up having to send the device back in for a costly repair to replace this back up battery.
But 10 years ago, or so the industry shifted to using a capacitor to store enough charge to keep the memory alive in the device, long enough to change out the main battery. Some Bluetooth hand scanners now tout the fact that they don’t even have batteries. Instead, they use a larger version of this capacitor to store energy to run the scanner. Only for a short time, but most Bluetooth hand scanners are taken out of the cradle to scan a few barcodes, and then put right back in the cradle, the capacitor stores enough power to accomplish this duty cycle. And you never need to worry about changing batteries.
So, what is the deal with pulling the battery for 30 minutes in a mobile computer? Well sometimes the device has some bad data stored in cache memory, which is volatile memory. If you remove the main battery for 30 minutes, that allows the capacitor backing up this memory, to run out of power, and any corrupt data is flushed away.
Does it always work, well no, but sometimes yes. It is a quick way to try to remedy a device that is acting funny or won’t power up for some unknown reason. Better than sending it in for repair where the battery is removed for shipment and then no problem is found by the repair depot.
Since we focus on a narrow scope of products and services, we know tricks like this to help you avoid more costly repairs.