Dell Vostro 1000 Battery Charge Problem

Click on the battery icon in power meter in power options in the configuration panel. (windows xp)

Are the battery info fields filled in or are they bogus / set to unknown?

When the laptop battery lights are all on - the internal battery gauge chip reports the battery is full
compared to the Full Charge Capacity at that time.

You can turn of the notification in power options - what happens if you do?
Does the laptop shutdown after 20 minutes due to low power or does it keep on run?

but the problem is when i unplug the power it says the 7% thing and then it says random times i have left on the battery thing like right now it says 2 hours and 32 min (7%) remaining and it goes up and down 1% and the time changes up and down. so could it be a driver or something?

When the laptop battery keeps powering the laptop, with values bouncing up and down like that - it seems to me the memory register values from the gauge chip inside the laptop battery get messed up while they travel upwards to the OS. Though if other laptop batteries show steady values, the gauge chip inside the laptop battery is the source of the problem.

The software in between is BIOS and ACPI. Could try to update the BIOS - but be careful with that, follow upgrade instructions meticulously and make sure all stuff is back-upped. If i was in your shoes, i'd life with crazy values iso a BIOS upgrade.

how do i upgrade the bios on a dell?

ok i upgraded the bios to the latest version i could find 2.6.3 and it didn't change anything

I have been having the same issue.  I tried your suggestion of disabling the warning messages and that appears to work.  I still have a battery icon with a red "X" through it on my taskbar indicating: "1:51 hours (6%) remaining".  While this helps solve my issue of my laptop turning off by itself, I would still like to know if it is possible to fix this issue so I no longer require this workaround.  Let me know if you have any other ideas.

Thanks!