I now have this battery problem as well. UGH!
I have an Acer Aspire 3000 I bought with Windows XP a few years ago. I has run perfectly for those years until 6 months ago when the original battery died. I use this for school so I use it a lot. I purchased a new battery not cheap ($150 USD) but I wanted a good one this laptop is in perfect condition and runs well. I am taking CS so I need a Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 classes. I figured I would update my laptop to Windows 7 Ultimate for my classes. I wiped my Windows XP drive clean and installed Windows 7 Ultimate clean on the machine. Which has been working perfectly for 6 weeks. Never an issue until 3 weeks ago the machine states my battery is bad. I called the place where I bought the battery and they said they would replace it. I put the battery in and 3 weeks later you got it bad battery. This machine never had an issue with Windows XP and the battery. The place I bought the battery from will not give me another new battery. They tell me that have never had problems with these batteries until recently and the machines loaded with Windows 7. They are now telling me if a customer calls and says the battery is bad and they are using Windows 7 the warranty is VOID. If the battery companies are now doing this there may be a problem with Windows 7. I hope MS will get to the bottom of this. I can't afford to buy a new laptop for school so now I make sure I sit next to the wall with an electrical outlet so my laptop is plugged in. UGH!!!
Careful saying it's the OS, WindowStar..... "LOGICEARTH" will again preach to all of us an OS will never damage hardware, since he knows everything.... hehehe.
Bummer huh? Guess you'd have to do what I did, get another battery and go back to XP or Vista... AGAIN, like I said on previous posts. NOT ALL laptops are affected, out of my 4, only 1 has this problem. Only my Acer timeline. Not my HP Mini, Acer Aspire One, Lenovo X61. Because I keep on reading posts that they're laptops has no problems. That does not mean this Win7 problem does not exist.. IT DOES, period.