iBook Battery Info?

I want to go through a stack of batteries I have that piled up for my Indigo clamshell iBook but unlike later on in 10.6 and a white Macbook where I can just plug batteries in and get the Battery Info right then and there, I'm finding no such information tab under 10.3.9 All I get is the battery bar and "CALCULATING..." which isn't really of any use. I was told somewhere (it might of been here) that the best chance to revive iBook batteries is to charge them while running OS X (which sounds a tad weird) but I'm not sure if this is what they ment, or if I'm missing an additional step.