Help! Arrive just stopped holding a charge

[johnmcd348]

I don't know what's going on and short of doing a total reset and loosing everything on my phone, I'm not sure where to turn or look. Just a few days ago, it started not really holding a charge for more than a few hours. Today I burned through a near fully charged battery in about 2 hours. No Talking, no texting, no Zune player, just sitting in my pocket.

It's only about a year old and prior to this, I had no real problems with the battery. It would easily last 1-2 days with normal usage if I wasn't running the Zune Player a lot.

I know that I had that problem with my old Dell Axims running WM when I had a lot of programs running in the background, but isn't that not really a problem with WP7? Is there some way to see if/what programs are running in the background? I'm kinda at a lose trying to figure this out. It seems odd how sudden this is happening. Just last week, everything was fine, now it won't hold a charge or is running something to make the battery drain quickly.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks Ahead.

 

[lavalleema]

Well, there's a couple things you can do. First, get on ebay and find a replacement battery. Here's one I found for two batteries and a wall charger for $10.

2x 1500mAh battery+dock charger for Sprint HTC ARRIVE | eBay

You say you are worried about losing your information. If you connect your phone to a PC using Zune, you can easily back up all your data. Contacts should be stored in the cloud depending on your email address (Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail all store contacts in the cloud, not sure about yahoo, but I would think so).

If you don't have a PC and instead use a Mac then there is software for that as well, though it's not called Zune.

I don't believe your problems are with the phone itself, unless it's the battery. But, backing it up to Zune and wiping the phone may be helpful in this case.

I had an Arrive for a couple years until I switched to AT&T, and it's a pretty solid phone. You might also take it into a Sprint store and have them look at it.

Lastly, check periodically to see if you're phone has coverage. Sprint is shrinking it's coverage map (why I switched actually) and if your phone is set to "no roaming" then it may be burning up the battery searching for signal.

Good luck!

 

[lavalleema]

Just another thought. If you wipe the phone or switch phones, don't purchase apps from the marketplace. When I got my ATT windows phone, the phone acted like I needed to buy apps again. If you log in to the windows phone marketplace online (using a computer), then you can "reinstall" apps. There's also a place you can go to resend all installed apps to your phone, but I'm not sure where to go for that at this time. I'm sure someone here knows.

 

[johnmcd348]

I did a full reset once when the Ask-Ziggy app update caused issues and I ended up loosing quite a few photos that I had thought were "in the cloud". Then moving back through to manually reinstall all the apps that were loaded on the phone wasn't exactly a great Friday night experience either. I took the battery out for awhile and recharged it so I'll see how it lasts tonight. Hopefully, whatever it was is reset.

 

[lavalleema]

Yeah, feel your pain. Photos are never "in the cloud" unless you turn that feature on. Photos can be set to auto upload to skydrive as you take them. Every Hotmail account has a skydrive account with 25 gigs of storage.

Good luck, let us know how it goes.

 

[johnmcd348]

Well, not sure what it was. I took the battery out for a few minutes and reinstalled it. Seems to work OK now for the last couple days since. I don't know what it was that was causing it.