I have an HP Pavillion laptop that is about three years old and I have two batteries for it. Recently I have noticed that my batteries drain at an INSANE rate. I'm sitting here now plugged into AC power and opened my battery meter to watch it....it went from 100% to 15% in literally five minutes. What the **** is going on??? Both of my batteries do it....nothing has changed with the laptop (it's essentially an email laptop) and all I'm doing is writing email and browsing the web...no games, no movies. I'm frustrated as hell and don't want to waste another hundred bucks on a battery if it's the laptop.

Check the Task Manager and see the CPU usage. Most likely you have got some malware or a configuration issue that is hogging the CPU.

Also, do you have a CD or a DVD in the drive? Spinning those eats a lot of battery.

3 year old system you say.. Is that 6-cell or 12-cell batteries? If the battery dies to quickly it's going bad or the system is not recharging correctly. You should have it looked at by a service tech. Sounds like the MOBO going to be replaced. Not much things you can do everything is on the MOBOllllllllllllll

also in addition there is a M$ patch for latop windows to slow battery drainage. Usually this symptom is caused by bad batteries or a bad charger.