Legacy free computers and SUSE?

Has anyone out there tried to use SUSE 8.2 with a "legacy free" computer that uses ACPI? I am trying to find out if the stock kernel has the required patches to make ACPI battery monitoring work. If you just apply the ACPI patches from source forge, you still have to go in and modify the kernel or else the keventd process takes up 99% of the CPU time. Has anyone else (besides me) fought this battle? Cheers, Charles Tilbury