Maintain Your Laptop Battery Better With BatteryCare (Windows)

How many of you out there know about proper laptop battery care? There are so many urban legends and myths regarding batteries that it is hard to know what is real and what is not.  BatteryCare can help you understand the ways of battery guruness….is that a word? Probably not but hey it sounds good!
Way back when, it was very bad to leave your laptop plugged in and charging after the battery was charged. Nowadays this is not the case because the computer switches to a trickle charging mode when the battery hits 100%. BatteryCare not only gives you a glimpse at a glance of your available power including the time you have left it also does some neat tricks.
After downloading and installing this small application you will have a new system tray icon. Mine is all the way to the left. It tells me that my battery is 95% charged and can operate for 2 hours and 36 minutes at the current rate. This is a HUGE improvement over the normal battery meter you see in the middle of my system tray.

The first trick it can do is change your power settings to a different profile depending on if you are plugged into power or not. These profiles can turn down your screen’s brightness or turn off Bluetooth.
To setup a power profile you can visit your Power Options in your Windows control panel. Once you have them set up or you decide to use the built in ones, click on the BatteryCare icon and open the application. You will see the screen below.

Next up, hit the options button and then Power Plans. Simply check the box that says Automatically select Power Plans. Then choose the plans you want to switch to when you are on battery or AC power. When you are done click accept -  yes, it is that easy!

While we are in the options let’s see what other choices we have.  Under advanced options you can be notified when a Full Discharge is necessary to improve the performance of your battery. The program tells this by noting how many discharges your machine has had since it started running. You can manually adjust this number if you are not running this against a new battery, do this by setting the Discharge cycles count manual adjustment number at the bottom. I set mine to three. When you reach your set number you will be prompted to fully discharge your battery.

By clicking on the detailed information tab you can see the battery manufacturer as well as designed capacity and total capacity, This can tell you if your battery has degraded. Thankfully mine is fine.

Even after leaving the app running for several hours some of my numbers were at zero but for the sheer power of changing profiles on the fly and the detailed battery meter this app is AWESOME!  Thanks guys keep up the great work. Their website also has some awesome information on debunking the battery myths.
We’ve also discussed two alternatives to the Windows laptop battery meter which is something else you can consider.

Find and Fix Dead Pixels With Your Browser!

You've probably heard of Dead Pixel Buddy, a free app that helps you locate dead or stuck pixels on your LCD monitor. One of our devoted readers has sent us an interesting alternative that runs in your browser.

Willy Ci has coded it as part of his portfolio, and it's elegantly simple. Pick a color with the palette tool, click go full screen, and your monitor is instantly awash in glorious pixel-hunting color.

Since it's browser-based, it'll run on any platform (as long as Adobe Flash is supported).

Both machines I used for testing had a slight issue escaping from full screen - the chooser didn't reappear, and my mouse pointer vanished. Simply mousing up to the tab bar and right-click reloading the tab solved the problem.

Once you've pinpointed the trouble spots, head over to killdeadpixel.com and see if you can't revive them with their trippy animated gif. Switching to one of the fullscreen modes makes stuck pixels easy to spot by giving you a black background to work with. No guarantees it'll wake them up, but it's worth a shot since most manufacturers won't warranty a screen with less than three problematic pixels.