Listen to this: PIII Dell inspiron 8100, built in dvd rom, swappable cd-rw, 256mb RAM, 1 GHz, 32 mb VIdeo card, and a 15 minute battery life! Help. After being fully charged on the lowest power running available the battery dies in 15 minutes! Any way to help, the laptop is my mother's.

Gonna need a new battery. On a machine that old, you are lucky the battery has held up this long. I had a bunk battery on my Presario and they replaced it under warrenty. Typicaly they last about 2 years. The replacement I have has held up for about 3 now :)

November 18 2001= laptop received from Dell. The battery always was like this...Seriously. My MicronPC Transport laptop from 19997, the battery lasts 3 hours..still. Original. Dell=15 minutes.

Hmmmmm. Should have sent that one back in December 2001. You might try contacting Dell and see if they can help you with this. They may have a history of bad batteries from a particular batch.

Good luck
Frank

Certainly sounds like you were sold a duff battery, but there is one thing you could try (if it's possible)
Is there a 'battery refresh' facility on the laptop? I have a laptop which is badged 'Tiny' (actually FIC) which has a facility at boot-up to enter a battery refresh utility (drains the battery completely and starts a refresh) which did help (until the battery eventualy gave up the ghost after 4 years!)
Windows can often make mistakes whilst charging batteries if they haven't been properly discharged/charged. - the software which controls the charging (power control) mistakenly reads the battery as being fully charged when in fact it hardly has any charge at all.

..........which leads to another possibility - have you checked your power settings to make sure the laptop isn't set to power off after 15 minutes of use? it sounds simple, but is a possibility.

If your power settings are ok, and you don't have (or can't find) a battery refresh option in your manual, try booting, and interrupt the boot and enter the bios set up. Don't worry about actually doing anything - just leave the thing alone for an hour, and then exit - this may give the battery chance to charge correctly. You coudl also see if there is anything related to the charging in the bios whilst you are there.

Checked, it was set to 5 hours.

This is an old battery and what I fear is the battery has been trained to only last 15 minutes. What I would do is stop all power saving in Windows and in the bios.

make a folder on your hard drive called kill

Make a batch file called kill.bat
************************************************** **
@ echo off
cls
echo Running Battery Down .... Please wait
:copy
xcopy c:\windows\options\cabs\*.* c:\kill
goto copy
************************************************** **

make a Windows startup disk amd copy the kill.bat file to the floppy.
You may have to copy xcopy to the floppy
Boot with the startup disk

type kill.bat
and let it run until the computer shuts off (the battery totally discharges).

Charge the battery until it is fully charged.
Run the Kill.bat program again.

Do this 3-4 times and train the battery to use it's full potential. If this does not work, you will need a new battery.

I copied the kill.bat file to the floppy, but when I start up with the floppy in the drive and run A:/>kill.bat, it says, "Invalid Drive specification. Is this supposed happen?

Sorry, I was wrong about the video card: 16mb. It was fomatted because it was as slow as a p 200MHz. Seriously. The battery seems to be running fine now.

is this windows XP or 2000 with the drive partitioned with NTFS

xp pro, partitioned to FAT. Needs atkins:p , but the battery life is longer now: 45 minutes.

Please copy the contecnts of the bat file here so I can look at it.

When you boot from floppy can you access the C drive?

Yeah, but the laptop was formatted after the folder was created and now everything is lost. THe battery, however seems to be running fine now. Thanks and when I run it, it keeps saying, "File not found 0 files copied."