Hey!
I'm having a really trivial problem with my laptop battery. I should start off by saying that I bought a New(Remanufactured) battery for my old dell inspiron 8100. The first couple of days, the battery worked fine, but the past 3-4 days it has been giving problems. I "conditioned" the battery after it arrived, and it WAS working well. My problem is that when i try to start the computer with the ac power adapter, it boots into Ubuntu fine. However, if i try to start the computer with only battery power, it fails to do anything. It does however, drain battery power if i disconnect the ac power just after it starts up. In other words, im having to use my ac power adapter to "jump start" my laptop before it accepts the battery power.
The other problem i have (which could be related to the previous one). Is that when I log on to ubuntu with my ac adapter plugged in, it gives me the correct status, saying that the battery is charging, but it maintains the same status even AFTER I unplug the ac adapter. It doesnt give me a percent remaining or any other information. I would really appreciate any help on this matter. Im really having trouble understanding why this would happen all of a sudden

Thanks for any help in advance

what happens if you disable acpi in your bios?

Judging by linux-on-laptop notes for your lappy you should pass noapic kernel parameter to fix that battery/adaptor problem. There is a quirk in your lappy not your battery. The command can be an append line added to lilo or grub. Read the install notes for Debian on your lappy for better info.
Tuxmobile may have acpi/apm note on your lappy model. APM probably better than ACPI. Check what tuxmobile says. Dell may also have comment about linux on lappy too. Good luck.