You can check that your battery is detected by HAL using the command hal-device-manager. If your battery is not detected by HAL or the wrong information is being reported, you can attempt to disable the HAL backend by setting a GConf key.Select Configuration Editor from the Applications menu, under System Tools. Search for the key value OAFIID:GNOME_BattstatApplet which should be located in the path /apps/panel/applets.Assuming the path is /apps/panel/applets/applet_1. In /apps/panel/applets/applet_1/prefs add a New Key... called no_hal and set it to the boolean value of true. This will disable the usage of HAL (see  to learn how to check this).
