Clie not charging or syncing

[mmalka]

I have a PEG-S300 that just works when connected to the charger or in the cradle. It shows as charging the battery, but no matter how long I leave it charging, the moment I remove it from the cradle, it dies. I also noticed that once powered again by either the cradle or the cable, it resets (soft or hard reset, depending on how long it was dead).
Interesting enough, it also isn't syncing through the USB port: when I press the hot sync button on the cradle, nothing happens on the PC. However, it syncs normally through the IR port.
I tested the cradle, the cables and the PC with another similar PDA and all work fine.
Based on the fact that both power and data flow through the same connector at the bottom of the PDA, I am assuming that there is something wrong either with the connector itself, or with the cable/circuit inside the PDA hooked to the connector. Another possibility is that the battery is no longer holding charge (short circuited) and causing the hot sync problem - not sure if possible.

I was hoping someone with a better PDA/electronics knowledge could help me identifying and fixing the problem. So far, the only altrernative I found was to send it to Sony repair center, what would end up consting more than the PDA current value.

Thanks in advance.

[JohnKes]

Look at the pins on the S300 connector and on the cradle connector. Perhaps they need cleaning.

How old is it? The Li-Ion battery should last about 2 years. Can you tell what the voltage is both in and out of the cradle? Battery Log and LauncherIII can show you voltage. If they show voltage dropping fast out of the cradle, the battery is difinitely bad.

Don't know if this applies to a Sony: do a Warm Reset while it is in the cradle. The charge circuit in Palms and Handsprings sometimes gets confused and won't fully charge. The In-Cradle Reset puts things right.