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Battery status in toolbar

post #1 of 15
10/15/06 at 7:32pm
Thread Starter 
How do I show the charge left in battery on the WinXP toolbar? The system tray icon only shows to the nearest 1/3 and I would rather be able to see a percentage on the tray. My friend has a Lenovo T60 and it comes pre-installed with some sort of software that does that, it shows a picture of a battery (sideways, not upright like the system tray) on the right side of the taskbar, just left of the system tray, and it shows how much is left as a progress bar style and as a percentage, and that is the kind of program I would like, although just a percentage would be good too.
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post #2 of 15
10/15/06 at 7:37pm
Thread Starter 
I just found one option, http://tinybattery.sourceforge.net/, but it didn't work out for me - instead of reading the Windows estimation of time left, it tries to calculate on its own and fails miserably, plus it was in the system tray and showed timeleft instead of percentage left... Still looking and waiting for suggestions.
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post #3 of 15
10/16/06 at 12:56am
notebook hardware control


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post #4 of 15
10/16/06 at 1:10am
If you hold your mouse over the battery icon in XP, it will show the % left and also the time left, based on your average usage characteristics.
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post #5 of 15
10/16/06 at 1:15am
yes but the windows battery icon only has like 3 levels, full, half then empty. I want to see an icon that works plus the battery icon in notbook hardware control shows it in time or in % on the battery itself, no need to hold your mouse over it.
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post #6 of 15
10/16/06 at 1:23am
There are any number of battery monitoring programs that will show you a % remaining tray icon. RightMark CPU for one.
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post #7 of 15
10/16/06 at 8:47pm
Thread Starter 
The Notebook Hardware Control programs sounds good but also sounds resource intensive... I was hoping there would be a program that just puts the battery there, and doesn't have all the extra features that NHC has. I'll get NHC as a last resort but I would really like to find a program that is exclusively a battery. Maybe I should try to write it myself, I'm not too bad at programming concepts but I would have to learn all the ins and outs of customizing the toolbar... It might be more work than it's worth. I don't know, I'll see, but for now I'm still looking for one that someone else has already written.
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post #8 of 15
10/17/06 at 12:35pm
Im not sure if NHC is too resource intensive but i have used it from day one. On my old sony notebook i used it to undervolt my proc for better battery life and so that the damn fan wouldnt come on, i havent found a need to do that with my current laptop as the battery life is great and i never hear the fan anways. I know right now with NHC running just doing the battery and the little thing on the desktop its using 12,376 K in memory.
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post #9 of 15
10/17/06 at 12:42pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by hansenc
I know right now with NHC running just doing the battery and the little thing on the desktop its using 12,376 K in memory.

It's using 12MB of memory? That seems a little high to me.
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post #10 of 15
10/17/06 at 5:41pm
Thread Starter 

12mb is a lot, I don't see what it could be storing.
Like I said, it's probably CPU intensive and we can see it's more memory intensive than it should be.
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post #11 of 15
10/18/06 at 5:04pm
On my D620 it only uses 3-4MB when it's minimized in the system tray. In addition to the battery meter and battery information it displays, I also find it quite useful for changing the Nvidia Powermizer settings, CPU speed settings and Power Scheme settings.
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post #12 of 15
10/18/06 at 8:52pm
Well im not too worried about it, I have 2gb of ram in my system and i cant tell any type of difference.
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post #13 of 15
10/18/06 at 9:37pm
Thread Starter 
I guess I will consider it, but I want to know one thing: does it mirror the percentage and estimated time that Windows says, or does it calculate that itself?
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post #14 of 15
10/21/06 at 1:15am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by ricky28269
I guess I will consider it, but I want to know one thing: does it mirror the percentage and estimated time that Windows says, or does it calculate that itself?
(bump.)
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post #15 of 15
10/23/06 at 3:01pm
See if this works for you.

Link

If that doesn't work then how about this.

Link

Hope this helps.
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