Care and feeding of the Personal Digital Assistant

My iPaq has gotten very little love from me of late - not only have I been derelict in my writing thanks to the end-of-term crunch, but I've allowed its battery to lose all but 5% of its charge by forgetting that it's in my bag and not in its docking cradle as it should be during its idle moments.  Fortunately I had my travel charger with me today, so while I sit here and not check books out to patrons (I'm in the dreaded rightmost position, which means I only get business when the other two Circ Desk workers are occupied.  This can be a good thing for when I'm busy working on my homework, but overall it leads to my feeling guilty about not doing my fair share on the job.  I'm such a dork that way!), iPaq is getting a nice long drink of electricity from my workstation's USB port.  Which is good, since if the PDA ever drops down to 0% anything that's in its memory - i.e., my collected works thus far - goes bye-bye;  and while I do archive to CD-ROM with much greater frequency than I used to, just losing a couple hundred words of writing would feel like a kick in the gut.