My Gigabeat: Toshiba S Series Battery Tips

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Toshiba S Series Battery Tips

A lot of questions I get and see posted in the forum are regarding the battery life of the Gigabeat S Series. Here are some tips to get the maximum life out of your Gigabeat.

Turn off Harmonics. This seems to give up to 50% extra battery life. This setting is found under Settings and then Harmonics.
Use WMA with variable bit rate as the choice of encoding for your music. Set the Audio quality of your encoding to as low as possible (I use 135 to 215kbps, which is pretty high, but I use good in ear headphones). In Windows Media Player 11 you will find these settings under the Rip tab up top and the More options... selection.
Set your Display settings on your Gigabeat as low as you can handle. The two settings that matter are Backlight and Brightness.

These are the major factors that will effect your battery life. I you follow the above suggestions you should be able to get about 11hrs when listening to music on your Gigabeat S Series.

Some other minor tweaks are to set your Equalizer to none and turn of Screen Effects and Sound Effects. This might give you some extra juice...

posted by Tomas @ 6:13 PM

| discuss | |

del.icio.us |

digg this

10 Comments:

Mozhoven said...: Many people seem to be getting bad batteries on he S30s they buy. My wife's battery only lasted an hour before dying, so I replaced it. Of course, she could have killed it by listening to it a work with the AC plugged in 8 hours a day. I'm not sure. But the new battery works like a champ and I have her play on battery power alone, only plugging it when to charge (and not play at that time...)

There's a guy selling S30 batteries on ebay, but they will work fine in an F40 (I tried with success).

It's a 3.7v 1000mAh Li-on battery.
It was only $30US shipped.

Here's the link:

http://cgi.ebay.com/TOSHIBA-PMP-GIGABEAT-GIGABEAT-S-MES30VW-S30-BATTERY_W0QQitemZ250070840052QQihZ015QQcategoryZ294QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

The stock battery is only 830mAh, so this new battery will last a bit longer.... (BTW, These batteries work in the F40 as well....); Mon Jan 15, 05:08:00 AM 2007
Anonymous said...: These tips don't help that it runs out overnight when swirched off?

Has anyone got an adequate response from Toshiba on that fault? or do we all need pens to disengage the battery when the S60 is not being used for more than a couple of hours???; Tue Jan 23, 08:03:00 PM 2007
Gothic_Seraph said...: when you use the button to shut down its going into a standby mode... like a laptop. what happens in standby uses lower battery power but it will run out eventually; Wed Jan 24, 02:41:00 PM 2007
mctwists said...: so bascially it never fully shuts down??? thats pretty stupid

i was seriously planning on getting the 60 gb version cuz its only 200 bucks on woot.com today (1/29/07); Mon Jan 29, 11:12:00 AM 2007
tschup0 said...: I had one Gigabeat S30 replaced when I complained about it draining overnight. The new one does exactly the same. I have not gotten any info about a potential fix or explanation about the cause.; Wed Feb 14, 11:54:00 AM 2007
Anonymous said...: To keep the battery from draining over night you have to switch the battery off. The switch is the same one you were directed to switch on when you unboxed the gigabeat. You need a thin object, like a pin, to flick the switch located nat the bottom near the mini-USB; Mon Mar 05, 12:48:00 PM 2007
Anonymous said...: Wow, that's 3 kinds of stupid. I've had no issues with other players other than this one. I've had it go dead over a weekend after being fully charged and not using it. I still have an archose that I don't use often and it still holds a charge after being shut off... and I don't have to use a pin to shut it off.; Sat Mar 10, 03:58:00 PM 2007
sunny.m.webb said...: I got mine this 3 months ago, and the battery life has only gotten worse as time goes on. This is a horrible device for the price I paid. The drive also locks up (it's said "Done." for the past hours), skips, etc.

Toshiba offers no compensation/return. I wish I had known about these issues; I'd have gone with the cheaper and more reliable Ipod; Tue Apr 10, 09:14:00 PM 2007
Anonymous said...: have you guys tried putting your gigabeat in hold mode as often as possible? this has improved my battery life A LOT... i put it in hold whenever it is off or i am not operating it while listening.; Fri Jun 29, 08:33:00 AM 2007
Anonymous said...: I've been very disapointed with my unit and battery, 4 hrs max is what i get out of it now and its only 6 months old. I cant believe toshiba wont do anything about this when you pay $400 for something you expect it to work. Fuck toshiba; Mon Jul 23, 10:52:00 AM 2007