I'm one of those infamous IT type guys - the battery is just dying, our Dell laptops barely last more than a year and a half before we're buying new batteries for them.
Every time one dies the story is the same - it was working fine (holding a charge) with no indication of problems, then *boom* the next day it's holding a 10% charge and effectively dead. It makes trying to plan for buying them ahead of time a real chore...
I can't put this part to any scientific test, but it *seems* that the batteries that die quicker are the ones that spend more time plugged in to an AC source than the ones used by very-mobile warriors who actually use the battery to it's full potential. Sorta knowing that, I choose not to plug in my BB to an AC source until I'm down to one or two battery bars left, and my battery is still going very strong, I get days of life out of it (8320 T-Mobile).
My personal Thinkpad laptop here even has a piece of battery charge software (from IBM/Lenovo) that will not charge the battery until it dips below 70-something percent, and stops charging it when the battery reaches 98% full. They (the software) claims it's the best battery saving mode possible for the laptop, so I just roll with their belief... (and both of my laptop batteries are fine 2 years later).
Conversely I have an old Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop I bought back in... 1997? that still runs fine to this day with it's battery; it sits under my stereo and plays MP3s plugged into AC all the time, and when I yank it off AC using the battery, that battery is still just as good as the day I got this thing. Go figure. (poor guy got his drive fried though in the last bought of storms we had, took a power outage hit)
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