battery life on t42

[yenkeeee]

I recently got my t42 thinkpad. I was wondering what kind of battery life i should be excepting. Currently i getting about 3:30 hours per charge. If i get a hi capacity battery how long can i except the charge to last?

[Bagarn]

I would say about 5 hours...

[fbrdphreak]

I also have had some disappointing experience with my 6-cell T42. Got it new in August and the 6-cell had 47 WHrs. A month, month & a half later, it was down to like 43-44 and my low brightness/wi-fi batt performance was significantly down. Out of the box, I could easily get 4 hours with adaptive cpu, level 0 brightness, wif-fi on, browsing the net. (40GB 5400RPM, 512MB btw) It dropped to 3, maybe 3.5 hours. Called IBM and the guy told me that if my series (T42 2372-NC1) got 2 hours, then it was meeting expectations. I told him I didn't pay top dollar for a P-M notebook to get 2 hours. So they shipped me a new 6-cell (My original one was made by Sony, the new one made by Sanyo if that makes a difference). At first, batt life was slightly better but overall still the same. However, after first using this Sanyo battery in October it is now down to 42.6WHrs from the 47 when I got it.
Now onto my battery usage. After doing some research when I first got the laptop, I figured that allowing the battery to completely discharge 1-2 times a month and then deep-charging it overnight was the right thing to do. Well, that might have had something to do with my batt loss on the original Sony battery, as I later found out that apparently that is a big no-no unless you have a serious drop in WHrs on the battery. So, with the new battery I have not completely discharged it even once and the only time I let it significantly run down was a day ago when it hit 10% and hibernated on me. Are there any better recommendations for ensuring the longevity of the battery? The best resource I found so far is http://www.batteryuniversity.com.
For the more experienced ThinkPad users, does the Battery Maximizer usually give you accurate run-time numbers? It seems to be approximating a little low lately. Thx