I have a IBM Thinkpad T20 with a new battery. What is going on with this is that I fully charge the battery, and it works fine except for when I use it, it will jump from a 70% chage straight down to 3% in 1 second and about 2 minutes later the laptop turns off. I only get 20 minutes out of a full charge. The battery the laptop came with was doing the same thing, only that one made it down to 50% before it went to 3%. Is this a common problem or is my laptop ready for the garbage can? I only had this battery 10 months and It was fine until 2 weeks ago.

Check to find if your battery has a recall http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/s...

Seems like the charging circuit is defective or you have an incorrect battery. It could be that you replaced the wrong type of battery for that model. Be sure you have the supported type. li-ion or nickel metal or even cadmium. You'd have to use a voltmeter too to see if in fact the voltages reflect what the power meter circuit in the laptop reflect. Also check for poor connections. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.

It either is possible that your charging circuitry is defective, or that your battery iteself is defective. I actually got a genuine ibm thinkpad t20 battery from notebookbattery.com, and it runs for over 3 hours. So see if you can return the battery and get a replacement - that would answer the question of whether your laptop battery is defective or your laptop is. live well

Sometimes when laptop batteries wear out and go "bad" (all eventually do) they exhibit this behavior.

could try cycling the battery to try and kick it back into life. charge it full then flatten till it dies then charge up and leave charging with it turned off for a long time say 12 hours then discharge fully and charge again for 12 hours. if this dosent help then its time to replace. some laptops have a function built into the bios to cycle the batterys. i dont think its a good idea to use that because the battery might be giving a wrong reading of full. all text needs typos. There there for the reader to find,to distract them from the total lack of content. google it! wasnt the answer to the question i asked so dont be dense and give me that repl