massive reduction of battery life

[TheRedFox]

a day after I got this laptop it read 1h at around 50% battery life with screen at lowest brightness. the next day it was only about half an hour at around the same percentage. now it is 41m at 49% charge, but only after recalibration (ran down the battery using knoppix boot cd), and using NHC to underclock to 600mhz and undervolt to 0.828v

have any users had any similar experiences, possibly with solutions other than shelling out ~$80 for battery refill or new battery?
if a new battery is only option where do you recommend I buy it, and which are best (eg. are Kahlon batteries better than old IBM batteries, or suchlike)

it is also worth mentioning, i think, that I'm in the habit of hibernating a lot (my last laptop started seeing massive decreases in battery life since I installed XP and used XP's hibernation utility) this fact is possibly irrelevant

[talz13]

I would also like to know if getting a battery from Lenovo/IBM directly would get me a NEW battery, or one that has been sitting on a shelf for a year. Are there any respectable battery sellers that I would get a NEW 8 cell from?

[TheRedFox]

I just bought from a seller on Amazon that claims new. is not an OEM battery though. I'll tell you my results when it comes next week. hoping for at least 4 hours of runtime. I'll be okay, I think if it were 3 or 3.5, but it's be awesome if it were at least as good as the original 4.5h X31 6 cell.

I'm trying to keep my expectations low, though.

[TheRedFox]

battery just arrived. it gets between 3 and 5.5 hours depending on how tweaked it is. I don't know if it'll get screwed up though, by like an issue with the production quality or something. we'll see.