Keywords: Battery, Laptop, monitor, charge, discharge, rate

Battery Monitor is a small widget that shows on the desktop the current battery details of your notebook, as the name implies. It comes bundled with numerous customization preferences, in order to please even picky users. The interface is based on a small frame that can be moved to any spot on the screen, with the help of the mouse cursor. Plus, you can make it stay on top of other windows and adjust its opacity level. Therefore, Battery Monitor is unintrusive, and you can quickly get a glimpse on battery details while working in other apps. The main frame shows a meter bar and percent level, battery status, remaining time, charge rate and current charge. Battery Monitor also features sound notifications for critical battery levels and full battery mode. It is possible to change the frame size, make it hide when working from the AC adapter, choose the capacity display unit (mWh or mAh), enable animation while charging, as well as specify a power plan for switching to the battery and back to the AC. As far as sounds are concerned, you can enable them when the laptop is plugged or unplugged, disable them when the flyout opens or closes, disable additional sounds, establish the two battery critical levels for sound alerts and select custom WAV files, and more. Sound settings can be restored to their default values. Other options of Battery Monitor let you hide the battery picture, status, remaining time, charge/discharge rate, current charge, power plans, title and copyright marker, as well as select custom colors for any of these fields. The small widget is very light on the system resources, using a minimum amount of CPU and RAM. It has a good response time and delivers accurate information, without causing the OS to hang, crash or pop up error dialogs. All in all, Battery Monitor comprises numerous options and configurable settings to please all types of users.