Disaster averted - or not? Sudden short battery / running hot.

[tourist-info]

My laptop, an averatec 2200 series, became unbootable about a month ago. I had a partition open with enough space to do a second install of XP Pro and copy over my photos and design files, so I lucked out not to have lost my work. I've since bought an external hard drive for backup - lesson learned.

Anyway, initially there were a few drivers missing that I found and installed - now I'm showing no hardware issues whatsoever, and my laptop is happily crunching graphics faster than before due to the clean install.

Problem is that now it DEVOURS the battery in about twenty minutes, and more troublesome, it's running sometimes very hot. I've also noticed that the button that used to enable power saver mode doesnt seem to work - it's always running full bore. I'm not really sure what could be causing all of this suddenly. I used to be on top of computer troubleshooting, but it's been awhile.

Any ideas?