Stefan Monnier wrote:
You are spot on. The original life was about 3:30 in "normal" use, but the motherboard died and since I got it back from HP (actually, it was the "HP certified partner" who fixed it), it's been about an hour. In hindsight they probably swopped out the battery, since the notebook was only two months old at the time. Anyway, after sending the original mail I tried running it down a few times (used memtest86 so there's no OS involved) and recharging it, and each time the recharge and discharge times were shorter. After three times it died completely.Given the specs of your battery (10.8V 4.8Ah, i.e. 51Wh), an autonomy of one hour means your laptop consumes around 50W, which is a hell of a lot for a laptop, unless you keep it constantly in stress test (with full CPU and disk, and graphics card load). So I'd guess that your battery's original lifetime is a good bit longer (at least 2h), and that when it lasted an hour, it was already on its death bed.
Get a new one, or try refilling this one.
New one on order... Thanks