The Windows development team does not put a lot of effort on displaying information about your laptop’s or netbook’s battery information. If Windows 7 is installed on a computer with a battery, it will detect the battery presence and shows you the level of the battery charge. In Windows XP, it also shows you the battery level together with an estimated remaining time. Previously I have posted a software called BatteryBar which is very useful in giving you more information about your battery such as capacity, charge rate and etc. However BatteryBar requires installation and hooks three DLL files into explorer.exe, increasing the memory usage of Explorer.
Fortunately Nir Sofer has created a small (74KB) portable tool called BatteryInfoView that displays the current status and information about your battery. The displayed battery information includes the battery name, manufacture name, serial number, manufacture date, power state (charging/discharging), current battery capacity, full charged capacity, voltage, charge/discharge rate, and more…
Not all battery information are displayed on BatteryInfoView as some information such as battery temperature, manufactured date and serial number will only be displayed if the battery provides this information.
Running BatteryInfoView.exe will by default display the battery information. There is another view called “Battery Log” where a new log containing the status of the battery (Power State, % Capacity, Capacity Value, Rate and Voltage) is added every 60 seconds. You can change the log interval in the ‘Advanced Options’ window (F9). You can also easily create a HTML report by right clicking on the program and select HTML Report – All Items. The HTML report file (report.html) will be saved to the same location as where you run the BatteryInfoView.exe from.
BatteryInfoView is free, portable and works on any version of Windows, starting from windows 2000 and up to Windows 7. Since it is portable, this tool will be on my USB flash drive toolbox.