Any way to reset laptop battery values?

ok i was in class the other day and my battery on my netbook (dell mini 9) got way low... low enough to hit the critical battery value and shutdown... problem was it didnt do a normal shut down it just shutoff like someone pulled the power.

So i came home and let the lil guy charge all the way and i realized that when i opened up batteryinfo i had a wear level 10% higher than what i originally had 15% total. It seems as though battery life is the same... as now the draw idiling on the desktop with the brightness all the way up is significantly lower than before.... so it just seems like the values are all off. Is there any way to reset the values to original?

Let it do a full cycle - Once you believe it's fully charged, let it fully discharge, then fully charge again.

Laptop batteries establish a memory from partial charges/discharges which hurts total capacity, the best thing to counter that is to let the battery fully charge and fully discharge... Ideally that would always happen, but realistically, usually we recharge things before they are fully discharged and sometimes we can't always let it charge completely before we interrupt it.

ya thats what im doin right now... i had let it charge completely over night then this morning i turned it on and am in the process of let it fully drain till it cant run no more. then ill charge it up... or should i let it wait after its been fully discharged for a bit then charge?

I don't think that will do much to bring back missing capacity, unfortunately--it's been my experience that these battery reconditioning exercises just "resets the zero level" so you don't have a rapid drop from 20% to 0% at the end of a discharge cycle.

But I'd very much like to be wrong on this one! -- Paul

*edit*
@nd4spdbh2: I don't think there's any real reason to wait before doing the recharge. But I'd love to hear the opinions of others.
*/edit*

we will see... ima let it sit and charge for a coupla hours without touching it... ill report back in later

Well looks like a full discharge netted me 6% less wear... went from 15% to 9% wear level... ill use it a coupla weeks then do another full charge n discharge n see what happens.

That's good to hear. Thanks for keeping us posted -- Paul