Aspire 1670 battery lasting 10 minuets fully charged?

OK so, i got a new laptop for Christmas, and it was a second hand Acer Aspire 1670, i'm not sure what year it was made ( in System Properties it says Version 2002 if that helps), but its windows XP, and the battery would run flat in about 15 minuets.
so i just bought a new battery and i waited for it to fully charge, i turned it on, and it lasted about 20 min, however the paper it came with said it may take a few charges, and it just ran out if power so i shut it off and i charged it fully again, and its been on about 5 minuets and its already down to 73% remaining. im just worried that its not the battery, and its something im not trying. i use the internet everytime, but i only have 2 tabs open and msn, and thats it. so its not like im using a of pc energy. any suggestions? im open to anything. please help.
by the time i finished writing this it went from 85% to 66% in about 5 minuets.
thanksyou in advace for any help

 

wrap battery in newspaper and seal in a plastic bag. put in freezer for a week. leave it overnight or for a day to return to room temperature. recharge and recalibrate by totally cycling the batery a couple of times. It will not 100% recover, but you should get over halfway to new. YES it works. NO it will not ruin your battery. I have done this on an AAO which was giving 30mins, Now it gives 125 An Asus eee 701 was likewise almost dead. It went back up to 3 hours. * A common failure mode on Lithium batteries is for the electrolyte gel to form crystals. A week or so at -18C restores the gel.. You will find that the battery will lose a bit of capacity over the first 2 or 3 cycles. Then it should stabilize. If that doesnt work, try ebay.

 

Hi there,

Not sure that the above will help given that you have bought a new battery.
It sounds like windows is not calibrating the battery. Try going into power settings in control panel and disabling all power warnings and auto shut down at x% then fully charge the battery and run it down until the pc shuts down do this a few times then see what xp reports for battery life

Paul

 

There's also a handy piece of free software called BatteryBar that works on virtually all Windows platforms. I use it in place of the standard battery reporting (I turn off the windows battery icon). BatteryBar will give you more details about your battery than you're used to seeing as well as correctly calculating it's lifespan. It's never let me down. If you're worried that the battery you've bought is dodgy then I'd suggest installing BatteryBar, at least for a while and see what it reports vs what Windows is saying.

You can find it here: http://osirisdevelopment.com/BatteryBar/

I bought a replacement battery for my partners HP laptop a while ago, it originally lasted several hours, but within weeks it was completely dead. So yes, you can buy new batteries that are defective and should be returned for warranty or replacement.