Power Meter Plus

Power Meter Plus is a battery monitoring tool that shows the current status of the laptop battery right on the desktop.

In essence just a very lightweight application that keeps an eye on battery power levels, Power Meter Plus provides many more tools than that.

First of all, the battery level can be easily monitored via a floating window that stays on top of all the other apps all the time. What's more, it gradually gets more visible as power levels drop, so the window is fully visible when you're about to run out of power.

Because keeping such a floating window always on top may affect your workflow, it was developed to switch from left to right side and vice-versa, depending on your mouse clicks. If for example you click on the window displayed in the left side of the screen, it automatically moves to the right side.

The configuration screen comes with some interesting options, allowing you to choose the colors and the bar graph display, as well as two different thresholds, namely battery critical level and battery effectively full level.

As you may expect, Power Meter Plus runs on very low resources and it gets along very well with all Windows iterations, without even asking for administrator privileges.

As a conclusion, Power Meter Plus is one of the most popular battery monitoring solutions, requiring basic computer knowledge and providing plenty of configuration options. It's freeware and although a help manual does not exist, most of the features rely on a very intuitive approach.