When I stopped to use the wireless in Munich airport last week, it seemed that the battery in my laptop drained itself really quickly.

I've just done a quick bit of testing today, and in 4 minutes of wall time, the battery meter reckons there are 11 fewer minutes of battery remaining.

This is on my Sony Vaio SRX87, running Ubuntu 5.10. Frequency scaling (SpeedStep) appears to be working correctly.

Is it just because the battery's getting old? I picked up the laptop in September 2002, so it's almost 4 years old. Do I need to buy a new battery, or can I recondition this one somehow?

(It also reckons that it'll take over an hour to recharge those 11 minutes of battery, but that could be a bug in Ubuntu -- I saw it claiming a couple of thousand hours to recharge the battery a week or so ago).