Since the past few weeks, my battery has been giving me hardly 20 minutes. Is there some software/utility that I can use to check the "health" of my laptop battery and determine if the battery needs replacement or whether the problem is something else?

All I can share is that I am running XP on my Laptop and when I try to go into Power Properties | VAIO Power Management option, I get the error message shown in the attached image.

Will appreciate your help.

Thanks.

Search for Batterymonitor and you will get some recommendations. Was this notebook on Vista originally?

cheers ...