So far I have used 3 laptops and they are Twinhead and 2 Acers. Usually branded laptops will come with a genuine Windows operating system license and also bundled with a lot of custom applications. An example is my Acer Travelmate 6293 laptop comes with ePower Management, GridVista, Bio Protection, VCM, eRecovery Management and etc. Of course they’re all very useful tools but definitely not for people like me. First thing I do when I got my laptop was to make a full backup of my hidden partition and then reformat the hard drive to install a clean copy of Windows so I can use it without all those unnecessary applications that can slow down my computer.
Battery Remaining Time
Although I don’t need all those extra tools, there is one important feature that I need which is able to easily know the battery remaining time or the percentage of the battery level. I know I can move my mouse cursor to the battery icon at the notification area (system tray) which shows the battery remaining time but it’s troublesome and I needed something that I can immediately know just by looking at it. I found a free battery meter monitoring software and it has some really impressive features.

BatteryBar is a simple, straight-forward, battery meter that monitors the status of your battery and displays your battery’s status in the taskbar. BatteryBar constantly monitors the status of your battery as you use your laptop. As it monitors your battery, it keeps historical data on your battery and provide you with a very accurate estimate of how much time is remaining on your battery.

Battery Remaining Time

When you’re running on battery, BatteryBar shows the percentage bar in green, yellow, or red, depending on how much battery power is remaining. The bar displays the time left on your battery in Hours:Minutes. When charging, the percentage bar is shown in blue to indicate charging, and the estimated time to full charge is shown. The bar turns black and shows “On A/C” when fully charged.

BatteryBar has a very useful feature which is able to determine the wear and tear of your battery. There is no help file to explain how does the “battery wear” works but it seemed to work pretty accurately or at least give you an idea if it’s not. My new Acer laptop battery wear is at 0% because it’s new and I seldom use it. On my old Acer laptop which I’ve been using for 3 years+, it shows a 44.3% wear and full lifetime of 1 hour 19 minutes which I think it’s around there.

There is no executable file to BatteryBar and it loads a few DLL files (batmeter.dll, BatteryBar.dll, BatteryBar.utilities.dll) from explorer.exe. This increases the memory usage of explorer.exe by about 8-9MB. You can’t find any shortcut to launch BatteryBar either because it can be enabled by right clicking the taskbar, go to Toolbars and select BatteryBar. BatteryBar requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and runs on Windows XP/Vista (32bit).

Battery Remaining Time

If you like the free version of BatteryBar, you can upgrade to PRO version at the price of only $7.50. The PRO version monitors your battery life and when your battery power gets low, BatteryBar will notify you with a popup window and a sound. A second notification window appears when your battery reaches critical level. Other than that, BatteryBar Pro provides you with the ability to change 20 different settings such as language, fonts, warning levels, and etc so that you can customize BatteryBar to your own needs.

[ Download BatteryBar ]

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