infolithium battery completely drained, now won't work

[fmillion]

I just found my long lost Sony Mavica FD83 when cleaning out some boxes of parts. I was happy to find it and wanted to get it going again as a spare camera and also as a quick eBay picture taker (quicker to take a low-res pic than dealing with memory cards).

However, I found the battery had gone completely, and I mean COMPLETELY, dead. Absolutely no power-on. I took the battery out of the camera and charged it in the charger, BC-V615A. I waited a few hours until the light went out, then replaced the battery in the camera.

The camera powered up fine, and I was greeted with the time set controls. Obviously the battery had been so drained that the camera couldn't even keep its clock going. (We're probably talking two years or more of completel non-use.)

Now the problem. I was setting the time, when suddenly the screen flipped to "For InfoLithium Battery Only" and the camera then turned off.

I browsed the net and found that people are experiencing this with third-party batteries that are not genuine Sony. However, this battery is indeed a genuine Sony battery and performed fine until the camera fell into disuse.

Is this battery just totally shot? Obviously it still will hold power as the camera did power up just fine, my guess is the InfoLithium chip inside somehow got messed up from the lack of power. If it actually is a simplistic CPU as I've read, perhaps it "crashed".

I also have an NP550 battery that I also found to be totally flat, and I'm charging that with hopes that it might help, but I'm not optimistic. I'd like to get this going again, but the batteries are clearly damaged somehow. Or maybe the camera is.

Advice anyone?
Thanks.

[Aladyforty]

Sorry but the battery is stuffed, they dont last after that amount of time down, not worth mucking around with. The camera should be Ok if you get a decent battery for it.

[Aladyforty]

you may also have a small hidden battery inside the camera that powers the internal clock and so forth which may have to be replaced as well.

[fmillion]

OK well I left the battery in the cam overnight and just for kicks tried it and today it worked just fine, the battery guage showed up with 89 mins remaining on the 330 battery. Infolithium must be more robust than I thought. Plus it kept the clock time even after I pulled the battery for a few minutes just to test. So this has a happy ending. I'm gonna use the cam for a while and see if the guage is really accurate but any time is better than none, since I'm planning to use this as an eBay camera - quicker to dump a pic into eBay off floppy then hooking up my cardreader. lol

[Aladyforty]

well thats great, this has happened to more than one person i know and they did not get that response from the battery. You must have got a good one:-)