Hello, the problem i'm having is when I go from ac current to battery, after about five minutes the battery will go dead. If I charge it to about 30 percent I can get it to last about 45 minutes. The question I have is would it be better to use the laptop with the battery out or will that put exsess strain on the power supply? The battery does charge until it's at a hundred percent. I always use the pc on ac current anyway, I just don't know if it will hurt anything to run it without the battery. I know the simple answer is to get another battery, the problem is I barely have enough money for a pack of smokes. The laptop is a toshiba satellite 1805-S203. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, John...

Try to completely discharge the battery then charge to 100%. Doing this once a week may help.

Bah, bad advice. If your battery is of the newer sort, within the past few years, then complete discharges are EXTREMELY BAD. The battery may not hold a charge if completely drained, especially older ones. The rule f thumb for these newer batteries is to try not to discharge below 40-50%. Also, if you don't plan to use the battery for some time then do not leave the battery fully charged. Discharge it to 80% then put it in storage. Also FYI, these newer batteries are only good for a few years anyway, regardless of use. The electrodes in them eat themselves with time and eventually will die. The advice in the post above is only good for the older batteries (I'm feeling pretty retarded right now because I can't remember the technology used in either). This power cycling or conditioning used to be recommended to restore the full charge capacity of the battery. But like I said this is no longer needed or recommended as I explained above.

I'm also having battery trouble. Very suddenly the battery (which would run for 1.5-3 hrs on a full charge) is only running for 30mins. My BIOS has a calibration facility which discharges the battery completely. When discharging, it will quickly go down from 100% to about 75%, then very suddenly drop to about 20%, then at a reasonable rate until 4% where it stops for 5-10 mins before dying. It's very wierd that it has happened so suddenly. I tried discharging then recharging a few times but that hasn't helped. I thought maybe heat could be affecting the battery performance so I'm standing it on some Post-It notes to improve air circulation but to no avail! Anyone got any further suggestions? As a last resort I was going to phone tech support but the shop I bought it from said that warranties usually exclude battery problems :o(