do you mean powering it at the top of the camera not the base?
Yes.. when I try to resolve issues with most things, I'll try anything, if your've read some of the older posts you may have noticed me mention how poor the usb connections are with some of these camera's. Even when it appears the camera is getting a good supply because it powers up when you switch on, but I can assure you.. poor connections on these camera's account for some of weird behaviour some users get, because I've had it happen myself about 3 or 4 times, mainly with my first mini 0801 camera I bought. Sometimes it would power up and start to record okay, and sometimes it would power on and just stop recording after say 10 or 15 seconds. at other times it would work for probably an hours or so and then stop on it's own. I tried different cards, but in my case it was proved to be a poor electrical connection on the mini USB plug. On another occasion when it started stopping again, I gave the connectors a blast of isopropyl cleaner and tightened up the connector a little, but this time it didn't seem to fix it as it had done about a week before.
I tried another 2 cables and a different power supply.. just in case it was that.. and it was exactly the same, sometimes it would stop after a few minutes or sometimes after an hour, so I removed the camera from the mount and gave the sprung contact pins a clean, and also cleaned the contacts on the camera itself, I mounted the camera again, and that was about 2 weeks ago, and it really hasn't stopped since. This particular camera is used as a dirt cheap home security camera watching my car on the driveway and the entrance to our property, so it's been running constantly for 24/7 for a good 2 months, other than when I've removed the card a few times when I've wanted to check the video and copy the files to my hard-drive, and of course to fix that power issue.
So in effect, if you connect directly to the camera you have instantly removed 1 set of contacts from the potential list of culprits, and Note even if you have the GPS version, your gps will still work, as the GPS will pick it's power up from the camera itself.
Sadly there are many factors that may be causing some users problems, and because of the nature of the beast it can be very difficult to narrow it down, all we can do is to try and eliminate possibilities, but in reality other than the issues I mentioned above I personally have had few problems, my second 2 camera's, one with just GPS, (same as the first) and the last camera which has GPS + the 8GB onboard memory have worked flawlessly for almost 2 months, these second 2 are the ones that are used in my car.
If you really want ultra reliability with excellent build quality then I can certainly recommend the Mio range of dashcams namely the 358, the 368 which I use in my wife car, the 368 also has WDR capabilities, and the image quality is impressive too, and lastly the mio 388 which has built-in GPS and speed cam warning too. I paid £163 for my 368, and the 388 is £199, the Mio358 is £149 in Halfords, but the mini 0801 image quality is pretty good IMO, and is certainly the better buy, especially so if you can get one that works properly, and obviously they are much cheaper.
Time to close this book...now that's what you call a reply..lol, not that it helps you very much... I truly wish I could offer you a definitive solution. ;-)
