My notebook battery has officially given up the ghost after less than two years. I hardly ever used the battery; the heat generated by the rest of my dual-core, 7200RPM-HD notebook did it in. It's not even robust enough to me to quickly unplug it and move it elsewhere - the moment I remove the power cord, the machine stops cold, just like its desktop cousins.

It's a limitation of battery technology and not really anything Dell-specific, though I wish they had included a cosmetic battery-compartment cover so that the unit could not only be operated without its battery, but operated without having a exposed trench in the bottom of it, if you follow me. =) At least that way I could have followed the advice of battery nerds and stored the battery elsewhere when I wasn't using it. This defeats a lot of the convenience built in to having a notebook in taking away its grab-and-go functionality, but at this time it seems like that's the only way to ensure decent service life for one's batteries.

Diversion: I Enjoy Being a Battery (The Onion)