Use your battery as little as possible, run your laptop from the charger.

Same thing with your phone. Keep them topped up.

At least that's what I've been told, don't actually know if it's right because I've never looked inside a battery ;-)

What is the best way to look after the battery?

Yes, we're all upgrading to 7 or buying notebooks with 7 preinstalled.

Why do you assume that's the cause of your failing battery? Windows is just reporting what the battery instrumentation says.

Of course, if you had XP you may not notice that your battery is only holding 40% of it's original capacity since you will never be warned.

My Studio XPS 13 came with Vista, but I've been using 7 since the RC and never had any problems with the battery. I support about 10 notebooks with Windows 7 and I never saw the warning.

I did see a lot of battery failures, even on XP, even on notebooks that were only months old.

I have HP Pavilion dv5 and it had vista on it. Always wanted to get rid of it and at the launch of win 7 i changed my OS. After a week of use my laptop died in the middle of the work. Recharged it and after the incident my laptop's battery could last twice less than it used to.. Now it lasts ca 15 min.

STOP TALKING BS AND START FIXING THE PROBLEM, YOU ARROGANT MS

I tell everyone not to come here and say "Omg it's your battery.. bla bla". IT'S NOT!

People should be informed about these batteries as they can explode or be broken very easily.
Some idiots even think you have to drain them empty to "condition" them!

Well to all morons out there, that is the way to kill them in weeks or make them EXPLODE!!

These batteries are NOT the same as they used 5 years ago.
These Lithium-Ion batteries are very light and hold a lot of power!

But they do NOT have a memory-effect!
Do not like to be drained totally, say less then 10%
Do not like to be drained FAST!
Do not like heat!

To keep them in very good condition for 3~4 years, still they degrade:

Charge them as often as you can, they like that.
Drain them no more then needed.
Do not drain them FAST! use your energy-save settings on battery!
Do not put them in the sun!

This way they maybe last 5 years, abuse them and you can easily kill them in WEEKS!! And yes they can easily explode!

...or what you don't know can hurt you.

Just because you were previously unaware, how is that MS fault? A new system has a flawed component? Say it isn't so! Mankind has yet to achieve perfection.

Sheesh.

Glad I switched to Ubuntu!

If your system is new and under warranty then go get your battery replaced. Of my last 3 laptops only one made it much further than a year on any battery. Of the 2 most recent ones, one had serious degradation in less than a year, and one failed outright after 14 months. The replacement battery also failed on that one is under a year.

These batteries do not have a great history of longevity, so it is possible that they are bad.

What exactly does this new win7 feature do? It could be as simple as monitoring the difference between reported charge remaining and actual charge remaining, and noticing when the two are off. It could be a little aggressive in crying dead battery, but if you have a lemon on a new laptop I would consider that warning a favor from MS as it should lead to a replacement.

In my experience batteries can crap out after just a few months. Li-ion batteries are horrible when it comes to high temperatures. My girlfriends Toshiba notebook battery lost a lot of it's charge capacity by 3 months, luckily Toshiba was good about it and replaced it. I tend to be very careful with my battery charges insuring I'm cycling it at least once in a while.

Yay, i hate microshaft as much as the rest, but still i had noticed this new feature, but not in windows 7 . (i'm waiting for SP1 like you should be, just in vm atm).
Ubuntu 9.04 has the same feature, except it might be slightly better, it tell you how much capacity your battery has if it is not performing right.
That's right to double check, download ubuntu desktop CD. boot off it. press Try ubuntu without installing, (the top option for those with trouble that means boot and then press enter, twice)
If your battery does have a real fault ubuntu will report it after your desktop has loaded in a nice little black box in the top right.
And i agree, batteries are consumables, that means your supposed to 'have' to replace it after a few years.
And for those that constantly use it on power never using that battery, what do you think is going to happen ?

My HP laptop is only 5 months old and only started having battery life problems after I installed Windows 7.

MICROSOFT STOP DODGING US AND START FIXING THE PROBLEM NOW!!!!

I hated Vista but at least my battery worked with it.

Did I mention my laptop was only 5 months old.

"My homelaptop is +5 years old and still holds +2.5 hours of battery life, thank you."

I'd say that was unusual, based on my experiences. IME, most laptop batteries seem to show noticeable degradation after a year or two. Fortunately they rarely last that long, as Sony usually posts a recall anyway ;)

I do wish manufacturers would develop a standardised laptop battery for each market sector; i.e. this is the netbook battery, this is the mainstream laptop battery etc.

So JL, it couldn't be that the battery in the dell is faulty and windows is correct then, no? Never in history has a dell shipped with a faulty battery? Given it's new did it come with win 7, so you haven't run anything else on the laptop to compare? You sir are a moron.

I have a spanking new Dell and it's Windows 7 serial psycho operating system is saying just the same thing as stated in the article.

If MS had another grain of arrogance left in it's corporate body it would 've probably blocked and/or shut-down my laptop without any other way then to replace the battery after just 3 months of operation.

My homelaptop is +5 years old and still holds +2.5 hours of battery life, thank you.

Another sign capitalism truely is the least obvious road to a consuming hell.