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[Wooster]

Have a laptop that's had a buggered battery for two years, tried all sorts to verify it was indeed dead, discharged etc. and so on, but it still only held a charge for 8mins and it's burnt out one power supply.

Anyhoo, the lappy got itself a corrupted registry and instead of faffing around copying the reg files over via Recovery Console I just used the recovery disks I'd made when I first got it.
Cutting a long story short with that, it turns out it didn't create a full image of the drive and instead took the lappy back to factory settings.

Lo and behold, the battery is fine and holds a charge for 45 minutes (pretty much what it did when new).  
It must have been windeez that was screwy in the head.

Moral of the story: If you don't fancy shelling out cash on a new battery, try a format instead.

[Condor Baggins]

Lo and behold, the battery is fine and holds a charge for 45 minutes (pretty much what it did when new). 

Was the battery similar to this?



 

[corroded]

How times have changed since the 45 minute battery! =]

[Wooster]

You kidding?
I have another with an SSD and I get just over an hour with that.

[Technical Ben]

Batteries are quite often "tested" by the laptop. Not sure if it's bios or driver related, or even an industry standard. But what the laptop does, is learn how well the battery copes. This is because there will be differences in production. Some coming out with good quality, some quite poor. It also helps to adjust the battery reading as it gets older.
So you probably reset what ever reading it had. Upon testing the battery again, it got some power for a longer time. Perhaps due to a better recharge, or lower power usage (less intensive use etc).

[Wooster]

That's the thing though, I'd tried all sorts in an attempt to make it do just that, without success.

It seems that once Windows has made up it's mind that the battery is goosed there isn't much you can do about it.