Power Meter Plus: There When You Need It, See-Through When You Don’t
Lifehacker points to a fantastic little utility that I’m already seeing benefit from. When using Windows on my netbook, I’m periodically checking how much battery charge remains. That means every so often, I’m looking in the system tray for the battery icon. I get a general idea of the remaining run-time by the icon, but specific details require me to mouse over and hover. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an easier method that adds value?
That’s where Power Meter Plus comes in. This small application places a power meter on your desktop at all times. Now when I first heard that, I thought I wouldn’t want to waste space on the MSI Wind’s little 10.2-inch display. As they say, the devil’s in the details and I’m glad I dug into them. It turns out that Power Meter Plus uses the “always visible” approach to it’s advantage. When your battery is fully charged, the transparent power meter is barely visible and therefore, barely noticeable when you really don’t need it. As your battery discharges however, the transparency level of Power Meter Plus decreases, making it more prominent. In this way, it becomes more of a useful alarm as your battery capacity nears zero. You can also have it move from one side of the screen to another simply by mousing over it, so it’s really never in the way. Very slick as shown by the mostly transparent screen-cap from my Wind which has about 80% juice left, which Windows estimates as four more hours.
Power Meter Plus is free for home use and $10 for businesses; it supports Windows 95, 98, 2000 and XP.
I really do like on of Lenovo’s own utilities for this matter. This utility embeds a battery-meter in the taskbar in a clean and very simple to understand way.
For netbookusers however the utility you are pointing to is a very cool solution.
I would like to know if someone had their hands on the Lenovo S10 to see how Lenovo implemented it there …
–Remo
I wouldnt call minimizing windows to get to the desktop easier than hovering a mouse
Not sure I follow. This meter is always visible… no need to minimize any windows.
Any similar utility available for mac?
@Remo Knops –
Unfortunately, those nice Lenovo utilities that are included on ThinkPads are not included on the S10. The power management software that comes with the S10 is actually pretty lackluster. I haven’t tried using the Lenovo power utilities from my T61 on my S10.