The HowToGeek Blog - Add a powerful geeky battery meter to your Windows laptop
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The HowToGeek Blog:
How to add a powerful geeky looking battery meter to your Windows laptop
BatteryBar is a simple, straight-forward, battery meter that monitors the status of your battery and displays your battery's status in the taskbar. It adds a battery life meter to the Windows taskbar with detailed battery life information and eye candy in a mouseover dialog.
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.
BatteryBar is free. Additional features are unlocked when you upgrade to BatteryBar Pro.
Features available in BatteryBar Free
Statistical Time Prediction
This is the most important feature of BatteryBar.
BatteryBar keeps historial data on your batteries as you use your laptop. That information is used to calculate a very accurate estimate of the time remaining on your laptop.
Windows reports a time remaining that's very simple and fluctuates wildly from moment to moment.
about your battery's status
Discharging
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
Battery is discharging with 2 hours, 46 minutes of battery life remaining.
Charging
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.
Battery is charging with 46 minutes until the battery is fully charged.
Other Features
- Vista style - The toolbar is using the same look and feel as the Vista taskbar buttons
- Statistical time prediction - BatteryBar 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
- Translations - BatteryBar fully or partially supports 13 languages. Anyone may volunteer to translate BatteryBar to additional languages
- Detailed Battery Info - BatteryBar is now capable of collecting detailed information about your battery, including max capacity (mW), current capacity (mW), charge rate (mW), discharge rate (mW), and more.
- Automatic Update - BatteryBar will check for new versions at startup and automatically download the new version
Features available in the Pro version
- Low battery and critical battery notifications and audio alerts
- Customize 20 settings, including changing the font, low battery warning levels, and more.
- New features in future versions that will only be available in the Pro version
Download
Homepage: http://www.osirisdevelopment.com/BatteryBar/index.html
Current Stable Version: 3.0 build 48
Released December 31, 2008