I inherited my mom's old laptop and installed Ubuntu over top of Vista, so now it is purely Ubuntu.
Her old battery only lasted about 10 minutes, so it had to be plugged in all the time, which I didn't like. So I bought a battery, and inserted it in when it came. The laptop doesn't see it at at all- no battery icon whatsoever. I can pull it out and put the old battery in and it recognizes it.

The new battery comes with a program (a .exe) to update the bios to accommodate the new battery... But don't have Windows anymore and Wine gives me an error when I try to run it, so I am at a loss of ideas.

I thought of running a virtual machine of Windows to install it, or run a Windows To Go drive(a new feature of Windows 8), but I don't think those are good ideas as they may not work or permanently ruin something.

I am not an extremely experienced user of Ubuntu/Linux, so I don't where to go from here.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.10 on a Sony Vaio VGN-NR, if that helps. Also note that I just installed Ubuntu the other day and have nothing important on the pc yet, so I am not afraid to reinstall Ubuntu if it may help. Thanks!