Hello,

Posting this here in the hope someone may be able to help. I'm now having major problems with my laptop battery. I bought the laptop two years ago.

I'm using an Acer TravelMate 6592, which originally shipped with Windows XP Home. Since then I've upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate and then to Windows 7 Ultimate just three weeks ago. I've never had issues with the battery for most of that time.

However, now I can barely squeeze 10 minutes life out of it, even on the Power Saver profile. The problem started suddenly a couple of weeks before the Windows 7 installation, when battery life decreased from nearly two hours to 10 minutes.

I'm also using an external battery, which usually gives me 4-5 hours use. However, this morning I connected it up and it was flat in 3-0 minutes. I did have the internal battery attached also, but will try again without it this evening to see if that makes a difference.

I'm not sure if it's the battery, the electronics inside the laptop or the AC charging port that's faulty. Then again, I've also heard of the power meter on Windows 7 being problematic, but not to this extent.

One solution is to test the battery with a similar laptop. Unfortunately, nobody I know has the same laptop as me, so any offers of help here are much appreciated. Also, if anyone knows how I can fix this problem, I'd be really grateful.

Apart from all this, the rest of the laptop works like a charm.

Time to pull some more hair out I think.

Ah well, today has been a bit of a rollercoaster emotionally. It started at about 8am when I got a call from a guy living down the road saying he was interested in my Acer Aspire 9504WSMi which I was selling. I was thrilled, but later a bit vary, I e-mailed him asking that maybe we should meet at a bank as I would either accept only cash or a banker's draft. Well to cut a long story short he assured me that he was genuine, and we agreed that he would come over later this evening.

Well he finally arrived, and all seemed to be going well, until he handed me £300 for this laptop which I was selling for £900. I called him on it, and he said he'd thought it was £300, suffixing that with the comment that he'd wondered why such a top rated machine was going so cheap - actually he had asked me what the problem was with the laptop earlier. Turns out he'd mis-read the price, wasn't prepared to pay £900 and the sale was called off. Oh well, that's disappointing, but I've edited the auction ad Here so hopefully this won't happen again. On the plus side, he saw that I did web design, and may call upon me in the near future to help with designing a villa rental site that he has. I also learnt a bit about the property market - strange how you can learn things in the strangest circumstances! So disappointing that the sale didn't complete, but all in all I think I learnt something - that people do make mistakes, and I should re-confirm the price in the listing in the future - even though it does say the price on the main listings page.

In other news, I'm still off Uni, as has been the case since Monday, feeling a little less tired than I was but still with the pain in my joints - I'm thinking of just taking the rest of the week off, working on my Discrete Methods coursework tomorrow and dragging myself over there on Friday to hand it in. But man is that stuff mind-boggling, especially when you're trying to figure out what IF NOT X OR NOT NOT Y AND ONLY IF Z OR NOT A equates to (Ok so maybe that was a bit more than is actually required and a little grammatically off, but you get the picture).

On a last note the Freecom 160GB Toughdrive Pro is really proving its worth - I used it to back up the entire contents of my laptop and it still is only a third full.