Think of your laptop battery like the old sce/scr's, they dont link being topped up constantly and prefer a proper cycle. Everytime your on mains with the battery in, you are topping it up again and they get that classic memory effect.
The ubuntu cd Southwell is talking about is no doubt the LiveCD, you just download it and boot from it, gives you a full Linux environment without
installing anything. It's definitely worth a shot, then if you get it working stably probably worth running the laptop flat, then charging and I keep the battery out of mine when its going to plugged in for a period of time. I can understand why your upset, the r700 is a nice laptop
