Re-calibrating Prime's Battery?

[rprosperi]

Both the 71B and 41C family have a BAT annunciator, to give you warning before batteries are fully drained, often leading to data loss.

The 41C is reasonably resistant to data loss unless you blatantly ignore it and keep draining the batteries (especially using the card reader - IIRC, the reader could pass at most 1 card once the annunciator came on). Most often, if you change the batteries shortly after seeing BAT, you will not lose memory.

The 71B is not quite as nice - you will often lose main RAM (though typically not IRAM in ports) fairly quickly if you ignore the annunciator. Once you see BAT, shut it down and do NOT turn it back on until new cells are installed. Plug in the AC adapter and change the 4 x AAA cells; the adapter will maintain memory during the swap. NiCd or NiMH cells can be used in a 71B (but NOT charged there) but the time between BAT and MEM LOST is even shorter with these due to the discharge rates at end of charge life.

So the Prime's system of saving state to flash before each session is really nice! I don't know competitive products well at all, however I'd assume Prime is the only machine in this class that does this, else word probably would have gotten around.