In XP I had just disabled the Low and Critical battery functions by telling it to "Do nothing" and the system would continue to run for about 1.5 hours with the OS reporting 0% on the battery.

I just upgraded to Vista Business and the Critical Battery Alarm DOES NOT HAVE "DO NOTHING" as an option. It only reads Hibernate/Sleep/Shutdown while the Low Battery Alarm shows Do Nothing/Hibernate/Sleep/Shutdown.

Can anyone suggest a way to disable the Critical Battery shutdown? I'm only able to run about 2 minutes on battery.

Thanks,
Pz

How to do it:

Select Balanced Power Option, then set it to "Never" for both the turn off display and Put the computer to sleep options.

Next click Change advanced power settings.

Find the "Sleep" category and set all options to "Off" or "Never"

Find the "Battery" category.
Set the Critical battery action to Sleep on battery and Do nothing on plugged in.
Set Critical battery level to 0% for battery and plugged in.
Set low battery notifications to "off"
Set low battery actions to "do nothing"

This will invoke the following behavior:

When the battery reports 0% the system will enter "Sleep" or "Low Power mode" Just press a key or move the mouse to waken the system, log back in and keep working.

Make sure you save your stuff often and be sure you know how much time you really have on your battery.

Hope this helps someone else.

Pz

Oh, you could go buy a new Battery... But why spend the $$ if you don't have to?