[ACPI-sppt] Weird Battery Behaviour

I have a BIG question, please forgive my ignorace here. I own a Compaq Presario 730US, I have had it for a year now. When I first got it I ran RH 8.2 on it and compiled the kernel to include the latest ACPI stuff. It worked fine as far as I could tell back then. But I uninstalled linux since I didn't have much of a need for it at the moment.
I just installed SuSE Linux 8.2 and use the defaul kernel with ACPI on. My battery info works fine, but suddenly one of my good batteries went from almost 90% "last charge cap" / "design cap" ratio down to 16%. Could this somehow be related to ACPI on Linux, could somehow the battery of been affected. I know that for the first day I didn't know I needed to start the ACPI daemon and was searching how to do that, could that have something to do with it. Or was all of this just coincidence? I got Compaq to warranty the battery for me and I just want to be sure that there is no way Linux could have done this before I try it with my new battery. 
Any help is greatly appreciated!
David Trotz