If you get the “Battery may be broken” message you’re most likely running Linux and Gnome. This a gnome-power-manager feature that displays the low capacity warning for broken batteries.

This can be annoying so here’s how you can get rid of it:

  • install gconf-editor (yum install gconf-editor on Fedora  / sudo apt-get install gconf-editor on Ubuntu)
  • run gconf-editor and navigate to apps–>gnome-power-manager–>notify
  • uncheck low_capacity

That’s it.

Other battery info can be displayed with ‘cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info’.