One of the great concerns in using a full-sized laptop is battery life. With some netbooks today boasting battery life beyond the 5-hour span that’s the average for regular notebooks, it’s quite nifty to be able to accurately gauge the status of your battery especially if the AC is unplugged.

Though Windows Vista has a built-in feature that displays the battery status, the value given is just a rough estimate of remaining battery charge. Some laptops can display this information with a little more accuracy but it’s not standard for all manufacturers.

My laptop in particular, a Compaq Presario c765TU is not one of them and I was envious of my friends who use Acer laptops that display the battery status with a lot more information than the typical charge remaining in the battery.

This concern is solved by a simple and free application called BatteryBar. It constantly monitors the status of your battery as you use your laptop. As it monitors your battery, it keeps historical data on your battery and provide you with a very accurate estimate of how much time is remaining on your battery.

BatteryBar accurately displays the status of your battery

It’s other features include the following:

• Vista style – The toolbar is using the same look and feel as the Vista taskbar buttons
• Statistical time prediction – BatteryBar monitors your battery and keeps a history of how long it takes for your battery to charge and discharges. That information is used to more accurately predict the life of your battery
• Translations - BatteryBar fully or partially supports 13 languages. Anyone may volunteer to translate BatteryBar to additional languages
• Detailed Battery Info – BatteryBar is now capable of collecting detailed information about your battery, including max capacity (mW), current capacity (mW), charge rate (mW), discharge rate (mW), and more.
• Automatic Update – BatteryBar will check for new versions at startup and automatically download the new version

More features are available by upgrading to the PRO version of the application such as customizable themes, sound alerts when the battery charge becomes low, access to Windows power scheme via right-click and so on.

But the free version suits me just fine and I could always control the power scheme through the old way by right-clicking on the battery icon in the Taskbar. Overall, BatteryBay is a good app in showing more accurately the status of your battery.

• Clean your PC with CCleaner (2)

Lately, I’ve been experiencing some performance hick-ups from my laptop, all browsers would just freeze some crashing, Windows Explorer would shoot itself in the middle of opening my Photos folder, the whole rig just takes a lot longer to boot up than usual.

No viruses, worms, trojans or other malware are present. No spurious apps are installed, plus the drivers and OS are up to date.

Then I a question just dawned upon me, when was the last time I cleaned out the hard disk of temporary files and unwanted junk?

It’s then I decided to install CCleaner. Formerly called Crap Cleaner, but it still does the job very well, getting rid of crap unwanted files in your hard drive.

CCleaner

In quick gist, here’s what it does:

• Internet Explorer
  Temporary files, history, cookies, Autocomplete form history, index.dat.
• Firefox
  Temporary files, history, cookies, download history, form history.
• Google Chrome
  Temporary files, history, cookies, download history, form history.
• Opera
  Temporary files, history, cookies.
• Safari
  Temporary files, history, cookies, form history.
• Windows
  Recycle Bin, Recent Documents, Temporary files and Log files.
• Registry cleaner
  Advanced features to remove unused and old entries, including File Extensions, ActiveX Controls, ClassIDs, ProgIDs, Uninstallers, Shared DLLs, Fonts, Help Files, Application Paths, Icons, Invalid Shortcuts and more… also comes with a comprehensive backup feature.
• Third-party applications
  Removes temp files and recent file lists (MRUs) from many apps including Media Player, eMule, Kazaa, Google Toolbar, Netscape, Microsoft Office, Nero, Adobe Acrobat, WinRAR, WinAce, WinZip and many more…
• 100% Spyware FREE
  This software does NOT contain any Spyware, Adware or Viruses.

It’s a petite 3MB download and is completely free. Try it out, clean out your hard drive of unnecessary files, and speed up your system.

• Display accurate battery status with BatteryBar (0)