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.
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.
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).
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.
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Good Day,
It looks like BatteryBar doesn’t support Windows XP Mode. I hope the future version will support virtual Machine.
My laptop has only the default power managment system installed (either it’s part of windows xp or part of the OEM package). I’ve had it for 7 years. The battery icon shows the % remaining and I can set alarms to warn me when it getting low (say 5%) and hibernate when it’s very low (3%). It used to work very well.
But one day the laptop just died suddenly without warning when it said there was still 15% remaining battery. This began to be a regular occurance. Gradually the time moved up to 20% … 40% … now 75%.
One would expect a new battery would solve the problem, but the new battery behaves exactly the same way! The laptop shuts down with 75+% remaining battery after only 20 minutes – it used to go 2.5 to 3.5 hours. I think the shut-off circuitry is not in tune with the battery. I don’t think it’s really discharging much, just the laptop’s power supply quits too early.
How does the battery standard battery % calculator work? Is it based on how much battery it thinks it should have? Or does it look at the actual battery voltage and calculate based on that?
BatteryInfo is similar to BatteryBar, but they are different.
1. BatteryBar is compatible with XP, Vista, and Windows 7, both x86 and x64 version. BatteryInfo is only XP.
2. BatteryBar uses historical battery information to determine time remaining. BatteryInfo does not.
3. BatteryBar (newest beta) support custom themes
anyone has try and compare battery info 1.2 with battery bar?
battery info can download from here ….
home.arcor.de/notebookbatteryinfodownload/bi_1_2_0_21.rar
wow, amazing tool. will install on all of my laptops !
Thanks for this nice tool mate. It shows Battery Wear 18% and my laptop is hardly one month old. What could be the problem??
Works on Win 2000 too!
Hey Raymond your Battery bar wont work on my EEEpc 1000H Either, it’s a Windows XP home version. Any suggestions?
this software is simpy great. installed both in my laptop running Vista Home Premium SP 1 and my Toshiba laptop running XP Home SP 3.
Thank you Raymond and cangrats to the developer
new info. for me , thanks
Another good battery monitoring utility is Notebook BatteryInfo which can be found at download.com
Great tool. Since I’m using Google Desktop, I’m using a gadget named “Laptop Check” which gives all the information like processor usage, memory usage, network bandwidth usage and battery time.
It works Properly.
Nice…
Thank You.
thanx alot man
Great Tool!
I’m the author of BatteryBar. Thanks for your great review.
If you have questions about it, you can contact me. There are links on my website.
BatteryBar fully supports XP, XP x64, Vista, Vista x64, and Windows 7.
Some people with certain netbooks have found that toolbars don’t work on their laptops (including BatteryBar). There appears to be a configuration issue with the pre-installed Windows. It’s also possible that it did not install properly.
@ Kitni – Ray did say it was compatible with Vista:
‘…and runs on Windows XP/Vista (32bit).’
Nice tool..! Thanks..!
snx!
спасибо!
Yes Raymond said it is compatible with Windows XP and Vista 32 bit versions. Please have a better look next time kitni.
Is the tool compatible with windows vista?
it is quite good…
thanks…
looks like a good tool. let me try it. thanks raymond
nice!!! :)
This will be handy. thanks
do you have any idea which model of laptop, battery can stand more longer? example up to 6 hour or more?
@gsing
Don\’t EeePCs have a modded version of Linux? That\’s what i heard. Anyway thanks Raymond!
nice tool! thnx Raymond
Does not work on my EeePC 1000H/WinXP. Selecting ‘BatteryBar’ doesn’t do anything.
Downloaded and installed. Works great.
Thanks Ray
@yaman: Allow BatteryBar to run for a while on your computer to have more accurate readings. It monitors your battery and keeps a history of how long it takes for your battery to charge and discharges. That information is used to more accurately predict the life of your battery.
amazing tool, if only they have a symbian OS version for nokia.
but when i use it i get a 1:09 full lifetime ,while my battery full lifetime is tow hours
thanks raymond nice tool