Is this an issue with my battery or something else?

Question

I'm aware that my battery isn't going to stay perfect forever and that over time the life of your battery will decrease but since researching about it on the Apple website and learning about Cycle counts I'm wondering if my issues are related to my battery.
Recently my Mac isn't lasting anywhere near as long as it used to when running solely on battery power:
Charge Information:
Charge remaining (mAh): 1399
Fully charged: No
Charging: Yes
Full charge capacity (mAh): 4666
Health Information:
Cycle count: 184
I know Apples magic number is 300 and as you can see I'm still pretty far off that but i'm maybe getting an hour and a quarter max out of my battery from full charge. Even if I just have one or two programs running at once (for example, Pages and Firefox) which to my knowledge shouldn't take up anywhere near as much battery as say, watching a movie.
And that's just one of the issues. Also recently, when I put the lid down on my Mac and it goes to sleep it'll wake itself up repeatedly, while the lid is still down. It'll make that noise (which i think is the hard drive) and the apple logo will light up and then it'll put itself back to sleep again. Then repeat every few minutes until I lift the lid up. However it doesn't do this all the time.
Another problem is if I leave it to sleep but leave the power on overnight (unplugged from a main socket) i'm aware that some of the battery will drain but only last night I closed it with 62% of the battery left and this morning it was 0% and I couldn't turn it on without plugging the charger in. It definitely wasn't doing it's waking up and going to sleep routine.
One last problem which I presume has nothing to do with my battery is when I turn my Mac on from being completely off it'll come to the grey screen, make the 'turning on' noise and then take about 2 to 3 minutes before anything happens. But whereas the login screen should appear, instead I get a grey folder icon with a question mark inside, flashing repeatedly until I turn the Mac off.
Normally a turn off and turn on again solves the issue but only yesterday it happened twice, one after the other before it would let me get to the login screen.
Does anybody know what the problem/problems are, if my battery is damaged or if the issues are related or not?
Thaks

Answer 1

Well it sounds like you have a bad battery. I got mine replaced at about 80 cycles for free because it was holding only 87% of its charge, so you should be able to get a replacement free of charge too.
As far as it waking up and sleeping, that is often caused by a external device. For example, if you have a USB mouse plugged in, every time the optical sensor thinks it moves it will wake up your system, then it will go back to sleep. Another thing may be a key on the keyboard being pressed when the screen in closed (if the key is being touched by the screen) causing the system to detect input and wake up.
As far as the folder icon, that sounds like a potentially bad hard drive.