Easily Know Battery Remaining Time

So far I have used 3 laptops and they are Twinhead and 2 dells. 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 dell 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 dell battery meter monitoring software and it has some really impressive features.

BatteryStores.ca is a simple, straight-forward, battery meter that monitors the status of your Dell Battery and displays your battery's status in the taskbar.

BatteryStores.ca constantly monitors the status of your battery as you use your laptop. As it monitors your battery such as dell Latitude CPi battery, dell Inspiron 8200 battery, dell Inspiron 8000 battery, dell Inspiron 8100 battery, dell Inspiron 4000 battery, dell Inspiron 4100 battery, dell Inspiron 2500 battery, dell Latitude CPX battery, dell Latitude C600 battery, dell Latitude C610 battery and dell Latitude C640 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, BatteryStores.ca 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 dell 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.

BatteryStores.ca has a very useful feature which is able to determine the wear and tear of your dell 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 dell laptop battery wear is at 0% because it's new and I seldom use it. On my old Dell 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 BatteryStores.ca and it loads a few DLL files (batmeter.dll, BatteryStores.ca.dll, BatteryStores.ca.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 BatteryStores.ca either because it can be enabled by right clicking the taskbar, go to Toolbars and select BatteryStores.ca. BatteryStores.ca requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and runs on Windows XP/Vista (32bit).

If you like the free version of BatteryStores.ca, 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, BatteryStores.ca will notify you with a popup window and a sound. A second notification window appears when your battery reaches critical level. Other than that, BatteryStores.ca Pro provides you with the ability to change 20 different settings such as language, fonts, warning levels, and etc so that you can customize BatteryStores.ca to your own needs.