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Laptop Battery Software



Having some sort of laptop battery software installed on your machine is pretty handy for monitoring the performance and health of your batteries. Most of us only worry about how much time we've got left before we need to start searching for a wall outlet but having some sort of battery utility on your machine can not only give you a wealth of information about but also help you maximise the performance of your laptops battery.

Built In O/S Power Management

Windows XP has some reasonable laptop battery software built into the O/S, go to Start> Settings> Control Panel> Power Options (Power Management for Windows 98).

There you'll find an interface that will allow you to set options such as how long before the machine turns off its monitor or hard drives, the length of time before it goes to standby or hibernates and also the low battery and critical battery level alarms.

Once you've set all the options to suit you, you can then save them as a power scheme. You may have one scheme for when you're in the office and on AC power and another for when you're out and about and using the battery.

Most laptops will have an icon in the system tray which displays basic info about the battery ie. whether you're on AC power or battery power, whether the battery is charging or discharging and also how much time you have left in the battery.

This is usually enough for most users but if you want some laptop battery software that does a little more then read on..

BatteryMon

Laptop Battery Software - Works with Win98/2000/ME/XP (Win95 and NT not supported)

- Has a graph which shows the battery discharging and compares it with a trend line of a particular life battery that you choose from a drop down (ie. 4h, 4.5h).

- Generates a log file of the charge/discharge level and other stats.

- The main interface can be minimised into a dockable mini window that allows you to monitor the batteries charge/discharge status, % of battery life left and estimated running time left.

- The interface can also show info particular to each battery such as manufacturer, battery temp, type of battery/chemical composition and also the number of charge cycles each battery has had. Apparently this feature doesn't work with all battery manufacturers and it didn't show me most of the information for the battery in my Acer laptop.

- You can monitor each battery individually when using up to 4 batteries.

You can download a free 30 day trial here.

Nistech Battery Bar

Laptop Battery Software - Works with Win95/98/ME/2000/XP (NT not supported)

- Neat little interface that shows amount of battery time left or time left till fully charged if on AC power.

- Colour scheme for the indicator bar shows the status at a glance, blue is on battery power, red is low battery, green is charging and purple is on AC power with a fully charged battery.

- User configurable warning and shutdown levels.

- Can be completely minimised to the system tray.

This is a fairly simple bit of laptop battery software and would be more suited to a user who only needs basic info. You can download a free 30 day trial here.

There are some things you can do to maximise the life of your batteries.

- Decrease the brightness of your screen, a dim screen uses less power.

- Completely discharge your batteries regularly. Batteries can develop a memory if they're not fully discharged and then will only accept charge up to that memory level, this will stop them from fully recharging. Your laptop battery software will usually have a refresh function which will completely discharge your battery and then fully charge it.

- Try to minimise usage of devices such as optical drives and audio components, speakers etc.

- Check your System Tray (next to the clock in the bottom right hand corner of your screen) and shut down any applications that you don't need running.

Of the two laptop battery software applications we've reviewed here, BatteryMon is probably more suited to an environment where you're testing and closely monitoring batteries or UPS's. If you just want a tidy little app to keep an eye on your notebook battery then the Nistech Battery Bar would be more suited.



If you've finished reading our laptop battery software reviews, click here to go back to our home page.


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