nloder

Hi, I've owned a MZ-B100 for about 6 months and it is a beautiful machine. I use it for recording interviews (I'm a journalist). I've owned a minidisc before but I've never had this problem. Basically, unless I've put a fresh (brand new) battery in each time I record, after I've been recording for an hour or more I can't rely on the fact that either the file will save when I hit stop or that the recorder will keep on recording. The two people I spoke to about this dismissed it as me running out of juice (it has one AA cell) or not using the correct alkaline batteries. But this can't be right because at this very moment my mz-bz100 is running quite happily on playback on a battery that died mid record earlier today. The machine told me after it stopped recording that this battery was "low batt" earlier, but the display on the machine now says the same battery is full, and the battery reader on the side tells me it is half full. Carrying the transformer around all the time isn't an option. So I've now got a drawer full of only slightly drained batteries and this is costing me a fortune. I took the machine back to the shop but couldn't replicate the fault. I thought of writing to Sony direct but my past experience with their lot has been poor and I expect I'll just be fobbed off. I came close to missing something really important today, so I'm at my wits end. I absolutely have to have a machine I can rely on and if I can't fix it I'll have to get rid of it--and it was eyewateringly expensive. Can anyone think of what this might be? I've made some attempts to locate an external rechargeable battery pack which would be a good band aid for the problem, but I've not been able to find anything that will fit into the very tiny DC in socket at the back. Any ideas would be very much appreciated, cp