Please Help Me With My Battery Life! It's Horrid!

This looks like a good place to post my thoughts on the Captivate phones.  I've done a lot of reading of  internet posts on the battery and charging problems on these phones.  My wife and I bought our Captivates at the same time over a year ago now.  Last September my phone for some reason started discharging when I plugged in the charger.  After a lot of surfing about these phones, my thinking was that these problems could be "program related"...maybe all the sentences that make up the program to run the phone get a little mixed up and/or out of order or what ever, and the phone screws up.  So, what I did with my phone was follow the instructions under "Bad Battery Performan After Flashing???" under "Battery Life", the steps after "if that doesnt work then try this method which has worked for me in the past", thinking this might reset some numbers in the "charging" and/or "battery" part of the programing.  Maybe the batteries in phones don't work like Little Johnny's battery in his toy truck.  After I did this, my battery charged up, but the battery life shortened to about eight to ten hours, so I did the above charging thing again.  My phone is back to the way it was when I got it, lasting about a day and a half, little phone use, wifi on all the time.  My wife's phone started shutting off on it's own (like other phones elsewhere on this site) shortly after my phone problems, so thinking about the "programing", I did the same charging series I did to my phone with her phone, and she has not had the phone shut off on her since.  Coincidence?  Don't know.  Worth a try, right?