Poor stand-by battery life?

[jebem]

I would not exclude any possibilities, before actually eliminate possible causes. I see 3 possibles causes:

1. Faulty battery: these devices can fail anytime, not because the chemical process fails, but due to faulty electronics inside that disable the charge/discharge normal cycles;
As Oseaco mentioned in his initial post:
"Oddly, the unit indicates that it is already half full after only several minutes being plugged in."
This is typical of a dead battery in my book. But it can be caused by something more elaborate and complex, yes. Usually the simpler explanation tends to be the true one, but not in every case.

So, test it: remove the battery (just need a small philips type screwdriver to remove the two screws) and use an Samsung or equivalent mobile phone to charge the battery and see how it goes;
Or replace the battery with another one. You can easily find these batteries in the market, they are standard.

2. Faulty battery energy management system: Yes, this can be cause by a buggy s/w routine interacting with the Samsung processor hardware.
Test it: see point 1 above.
Try to bypass it: Do full hardware Reset. And use HP support.

3. As Eried mentioned, a s/w bug can trigger a high CPU utilization, depleting the battery at a high rate.
Test it: see point 1 above.
Try to bypass it: Do full hardware Reset. And use HP support.

Please post the results here, so we can all know what to do when it happens to us