For a bit now, my laptop has been having battery issues.

HP Pavilion dv9500
~2 years old
Vista

A few months back, I noticed that my battery would stop charging at 7% or so, which while it gave enough time to move the plug from one wall to the next, really didn't allow the portability of a laptop.

I recently decided that I wanted to fix this. A quick google reads that shutting down and popping the battery in and out fixes this problem for most people.

However, upon restarting, it shows that I'm 100% charged, with an X over the battery meter. I unplug the laptop, and after about 15 seconds, it starts lopping off 30% of battery.

Read: It wasn't charged.

When it got down to 30%, it didn't warn about the last lop off, and hibernated. When I woke it up and charged it, it stopped charging at a tiny 3%, resulting in the Plugged In, Not Charging message to reappear.

I repeated the whole process from the beginning, and stopped it at 31%, plugging it back in. Which it is slowly crawling up from, at a pace of 1% every half an hour or so, but I fear this isn't truly charged, and will just completely crash like last time. (Edit: Yeah, hit 33% and decided that it was good.) (Second Edit: Then I unplugged it to see how long I could get out of it, and it ran until 31%, then hibernated. Repeat above paragraph.)

Anybody have any idea at all what's going on here? HP Battery Check says to replace it, but I have a feeling that the problem isn't fully in the battery here, and at 120 bucks a replacement, I'd be out of food for a month or so.



tl;dr: My battery is being dumb and not charging. And I'm too cheap/poor to replace it. Halp?