14 DAY TRIAL // Working on a laptop means portability first of all. The line is drawn when it comes to AC because any battery has limited working capabilities. If you want to see how much juice is left and get notifications for low levels, Battery4Life is for you.
Whether at home, at the office or on the road, if you have your portable computer with you and need to work on it, you should have it fully charged to maximize the amount of time available for using it. Also, it helps a lot keeping an eye out for the power bars. However, if you don't have the time to spare a glance, you could delegate the surveillance and alerting tasks.
Ready to meet the challenge is Battery4Life, a software tailored exactly for this kind of job, as you probably guessed from its very name. Weighing in at nearly 10 MB in compressed format, the utility will ask from you no more than that, a bit of disk space to stretch its bytes. No costs are required, but donations are appreciated to keep its development going.
The application runs discretely, minimized in your system tray, and displays a green battery which can show you the power level in percents if you hover the mouse pointer over it. In case you prefer more visibility, you can set the main window on top of all the running programs. Transparency is supported and will actually add a nice touch, that complements the topmost window setting.
An easy to read meter bar, high quality icons and simple configuration commands make for a pretty good interface. Not too flashy, nor too dull, the GUI is function-oriented but, just as well, it pleases the eye to a satisfactory extent. Even the dreaded ''Big Red Screen'' signaling the low battery state looks smooth and neatly painted. On the other hand, the fact that you cannot resize it could be bothersome, especially for those who do not enjoy large, green bars like those indicating the current energy state.
And since the notification subject is now open, you should know that with this utility you get visual and audible alerts, which can be used separately or in collaboration. This means that you will have the possibility to set two different power levels for which a warning signal is issued. To do that, you only have to move the corresponding slider in the ''Settings'' tab.
For the audio alarm, you can pick one of the three bundled sounds or choose one of your own, from your music collection. The recognized formats are the two most common ones, namely MP3 and WAV, so there should be no problems in this respect. To make things better, there is a trackbar on the right-side of the configuration window that will enable you to adjust the desired audio volume.
Another feature that adds to the value of Battery4Life is the ability to run in ''Silence Mode''. This way you will have the software running without having to see its main pane. The application starts minimized and stays out of the way, so you can focus more on your work. You can find this particularly utile when used alongside the ''Run at startup'' function.
Switching from battery to AC power has some interesting effects insofar as the program is concerned. When you disconnect the power cable, the utility will display, besides the fill percentage, how much time is left until the battery is drained and the laptop will shut down. Doing the opposite thing, that is connecting the charger, will interrupt the alarm if it is running.
An interesting aspect related to the accuracy of the prediction for the remaining time is that it will not always coincide with the one reported by Windows. It reads the same data, but has minor variations when the information is refreshed. The variation can be of a couple of minutes, but, eventually, the estimations will converge to the same result, so this isn't really a nuisance you should worry about.
Something else you won't be bothered by is the stress this utility puts on your system. It barely moves the CPU bar and when it does so, it's because one or both alerts are active. In this case, the dual-core 1.9 GHz AMD Athlon 64-bit CPU suffered a maximum load that reached 4 %. The memory consumption, on the other hand, is a bit more significant. During our tests, the peak usage was just over 22 MB of RAM and the application idled with 16 MB out of 2GB still at work.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
The Good
The Bad
The Truth
This article is also available in Spanish: Monitoriza el estado de tu batería con una sencilla herramienta
