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How do people on netbook get 12 hours of battery life? No idea, and I don’t even think that is possible. In my experience that can never happen, not least with the recent upgrade to a dual-core, ION 2, and other things that run the battery down.
But the truth is that no matter how powerful or weak your battery is, you’d find that the integrated battery monitor provided by Windows is a bit weak. The only thing you can count on is how much battery life in percent you have left. Sometimes you will see the estimated battery endurance, sometimes it won’t tell you.
I found a new tool called BatteryBar, and it’s actually a much better battery monitor than the one provided by Windows. It stays on your toolbar and can tell you either how much usage time is left, or on a click, it will change to telling you how much battery life in percent is left.
But that’s not the most useful feature about BatteryBar. The most useful thing appears when you mouse-over the battery bar. It will open up a menu showing you many more variables that are not available in the Windows battery monitor. The one thing which you can use to really judge whether your computer is taking up extra resources without any need is by judging the Discharge Rate variable. Hard drive, CPU, WLAN, screen brightness and volume all are culprits of a lowered battery life, and using BatteryBar you can do trial-and-error to see what suits you best.
Its chief usefulness lies in the ability to warn you when something is straining your battery life. If you sudden see your battery endurance go from 5-hours to 2-hours without doing anything, it serves as an alert that there might be a program in the background that is taking up your resources, and with this alert, you can turn on Resource Monitor to find out who the offender is. Most likely, it’s one of the more egoistic programs such as Apple’s ultra-annoying updater, Windows Update, Windows Media Player network sharing service.
After a while, you will understand what is the ‘average’ discharge rate for whatever task you might be doing. Mine’s around 7,500 mW when web-surfing, and anything over this is becomes a red flag.
BatteryBar now on charging mode.
With the AC adaptor plugged in, BatteryBar will serve as a charge time estimator. Discharge rate will become charge rate. With the AC adaptor in, the information in the menu isn’t of much use, but the charge time estimation does come in handy, as long as you take it as a ballpark figure.
You can download BatteryBar here.
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