I've got a laptop that has been powered down thoroughly a couple of times
(the clock was about a week or two off when I brought it back up!).

It seems that the battery indicator has become de-calibrated.  It won't go above
12%.  (It would read ~100% previously, when full.)

I called the manufacturer (Gateway 2000), but they had zero information for me.
There's a "battery learning software" tool that you're supposed to run under
MS-DOS for about 16 hours about once a year to calibrate the battery indicator.
I don't even have the floppy disk for that, and Gateway didn't seem to know where
I might get the software.

(I'm not the original owner---my brother is---and it's a long time out of warranty
by now.  But I thought that Gateway might know something about their own systems.)

I googled around a bit, but didn't find anything promising, so:

Does anyone know anything about this?

I don't know if my battery is really only capable of 1/8th the capacity that
it had when new, or if the calibration is just totally messed up.

I thought that someone might have reverse-engineered this by now for some laptops.


Thanks in advance.

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/