Vaio v505cp - Battery Issues? (Also, Hotkeys?)

I recently picked up a fixer upper 691m, or v505cp. I seemed to have no end of problems getting it to power up, with or without the battery. But it now appears to be over that. I also got another to use as parts, which did the same thing, so I'm not sure if the charger was at fault (the parts one turned out to work, but has a BIOS password, dammit).

Neither came with hard drives or recovery discs, so I can't use the OEm software pack. Meaning I can't seem to get the hotkeys working. I eventually found a Power Panel that works fine, but it's a pain going into that every time I want to change brightness on the thing. Is there a third party or other solution, as I can't find where to buy recovery discs, and really don't want to for the sake of a load of bundled stuff I'll never use.

Aside from that, I was trying to run it on the battery this evening, and all seemed fine. Then I fired up Second Life on it (quite high load, lots of graphics and CPU drain) and after a couple of minutes there was the click of a hard drive parking, and everything went dead. It refused to turn on again. I plugged the charger in, and it started fine, with an alleged 75% battery left. Started Second Life to see if I could replicate the issue, and on mains it ran fine for half an hour or so, till I exited. So I'm wondering if this could be a battery issue, as maybe the high load for a prolonged time was causing it to fail? Why it wouldn't boot straight back up though I don't know? Annoying if it's a board issue, as the spares Vaio has that irritating password on (and arrived with no screws and broken BIOS battery wires - Methinks someone tried pulling the power to clear it, found that didn't work, and threw it in a box sometime before I got it).