One thing that bugged me about owning a laptop was the small tray icon for displaying how much power my battery had left.

Having to hover over it to get an accurate reading is a real pain. And the IBM power gauge isn’t much better; taking up a fair chunk of my taskbar and is visible even when I’m docked.

That’s why I coded up my own power meter for Windows 9x/XP/2003/Vista. It’s a simple meter which has the following features:

• It gradually appears as the power levels drop. The lower the power, the more prominent the meter will be
• When you’re charging the laptop it’ll turn green and slowly disappear/fade as the charge increases
• The meter appears either on the bottom left or bottom right of the screen; it moves to the opposite corner if you move your mouse over it.. or disappears and fades back after your cursor has left the area
• A large message will appear when the laptop switches from mains power to battery (and vice versa)
• Small size! 76k executable & <5Mb memory usage