This article is exactly what happened to me. Battery life started fine. A week later, that message. Within a month the battery went from 90% to 3% and did an emergency hibernate. Moving back to XP didn't fix it either, it burned out that battery. I've since gone back to XP (thankfully I had a spare battery, they don't make my model anymore). I hope they fix this before I buy my next computer.
Same thing happened to me. I have a 4 month old Alienware computer and after it suddenly shut off (not the low power auto-hibernate, but more like a sudden loss of power hard shut down) I tried rebooting and am having huge issues. The OS will boot but during startup I am prompted to run checkdisk. If I don't skip the test, my computer locks up when the counter reaches 1. Of course I also get the error about replacing my battery once in the OS, along with erratic program behavior most likely because of some disk error. I would suggest that anyone running a laptop without a hardware warranty should consider going back to XP before they lose their battery or worse.
If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith. -- Albert Einstein