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Appears to be a problem with Windows 7. I found out that the following steps, revived the battery, which is possibly cau sed by a buggy ACPI in Windows 7. Running Windows 7 32 bit, getting 30-35 minutes of battery power when AC is disc onnected. Disable the Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method under BATTERY in the device manager. Put the computer on HIGH PERFORMANCE (I get approx 2 hours of battery life befor e it shuts down on HIGH PERFORMANC.....Eensure Screen Dim, etc are NEVER) and st art running Scandisk (Sector errors scan), Virus Scan, defrag, anything to make it quickly die. When it has died and there is no power left, remove the battery for a few minute s, press the power button, put the battery back in and plug the power plug in an d started the system up. When windows loads, enable the ACPI-Compliant Method. BatteryCare (cool program) should now be showing a FULL total capacity, rather t han 1/3 or less that it was previously. There is also no Wear Level now (for me ), it is saying 0.00% - previously it was 63%. Since the power on, there is no X over the power icon, its acting normally. Buggy ACPI - perhaps doesnt charge further than 40% and therefore the warning ap pears? Doesnt recognise that there is more to charge? Either way, this fixed my issue and I could then use it for 2 hours, it told me two hours and no longer died at 30 minutes.

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I have a Toshiba Satelite u205-s5002 which I bought about four years ago. Running Windows 7 32bit. I am using a non-OEM battery that is roughly a year old. A few days ago while I was using my laptop on battery power, the battery gauge s uddenly dropped from 40% to 7%. I didn't think much of it and attached it to a power adapter. When I turned my laptop on yesterday, I received the dreaded "consider replacing your battery message".

I thought that was weird as the battery in question has been barely used over th e year. It took roughly an hour to drain it to 7% at which point I disabled the "Microso ft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery" in Device Manager. To my surprise, the laptop survived another hour and a half after Windows 7 repo rted that the battery was depleted. Thus the total run time from 100% to depleted is roughly two and a half hours, w hich is the expected battery life with a new battery. Now here's the kicker, my laptop has a battery status light, and it didn't blink low battery until 10min before the laptop ran out of juice. So it seams that the laptop's circuitry is correct in sensing battery level whil e ACPI and/or Windows 7 is obtaining bogus numbers. I ran CPUID HWMonitor and Powercfg -energy, both show the following numbers: Design Capacity: 90720 mWH Full Charge Capacity: 32520mWH HWMonitor reports the battery voltage at 11.26V. The battery is rated at 10.8V @ 4400mAH. I have no idea what to do at this point because technically the battery is fine. The battery chip is probably not fried because the laptop is able to sense batte ry level fine while Windows 7 cannot. As an ode to the commercials, "Windows 7 was NOT my idea". It might not be possessed like Vista, but messing up power management is not coo l...

Update: I ran down my battery again (2.5 hours) but this time without disabling ACPI bat tery. I ran this command in cmd to disable automatic hibernation "powercfg -setdcvalue index SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_BATTERY BATACTIONCRIT 0". When it reached 3%/1024mWH it didn't budge for a while. It started showing 1%/349mWH only when the battery light on my notebook started flashing. When I rebooted the machine plugged into mains, HWMonitor showed a full charge c apacity of 38210mWH. Since 38210mWH/90720mWH is 42% (57% degraded) Windows 7 no longer thinks the bat tery needs to be replaced. I also think that the design capacity number is bad, it should be 44000mWH and i n this case the battery is only degraded 13%. A 13% degradation over a period of a year is reasonable, 57% is not... Other Thoughts: I am no longer sure if Windows 7 is entirely to blame here. It seems that information provided by the battery and/or system to Windows is in correct/unstable. Microsoft's mistake may be the assumption that the information presented is accu rate. Given that it is not always accurate, they should provide an option to toggle th ese warnings. In the interim, they should at least issue a hotfix the turns the relevant warni ng code off...

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