Laptop Battery Monitor

[maniac]

We've got the system tray disabled for all our students in this school, mainly to stop them accessing graphics control panels and the like that enjoy running in the system tray. However this poses a problem, which is the students don't get any form of battery monitor whe or a low battery warning etc. when they're using laptops.

 

I don't want to enable the system tray if I can help it, so I'm looking for a simple battery monitor application which will sit at the top/bottom of the screen and inform the user of the battery state and when it's running low. Anyone know of a utility that will do this? All the ones I've found run in the system tray, which I explicitly want to avoid.

 

Failing that, anyone know how I can control what's visible in the system tray via Group policy or simelar so I make sure only the volume control and battery status is visible.

 

Cheers,

 

Mike.

[Geoff]

All our laptops beep furiously when they are low on battery. It's a bios setting.

[craiglay]

How about this program:

 

http://www.download.com/Notebook-BatteryInfo/3000-2094_4-10470620.html

 

Craig

[Jona]

Quick google threws up:

http://betterwindowssoftware.com/products-7783.html

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Windows-Widgets/System-Utilities/Battery-Monitor-Widget.shtml

 

Never used either so install at your own risk...

 

Cheers

Jona

[maniac]

Thanks for those suggestions.

 

@Craiglay, that was perfect except that it also gets hidden with the hide system tray option in Group Policy enabled, so it doesn't solve my problem

 

@Jona One of those links is blocked by my LEA, and the second the download link is broken for but thanks for the suggestions, might check the first one out at home tonight.

 

I've downloaded about 15 different utilities that do battery monitoring, but all of them use the system tray. If I could use the system tray then I'd just use the standard microsoft battery notification, but I'm trying to find one that doesn't use the system tray, without any luck at the moment! Someone somewhere must have written one!

 

Mike.

[Jona]

@ Maniac - I've attached the download from the first link to this post, but still worth checking out the website as I'm not convienced it's not just a free trial.

 

Cheers

Jona

BatteryMonitoring.zip

[Jamman960]

just a thought, what could be very useful is remote battery monitoring. I'm no programmer but after doing abit of searching it appears as though it would be possible to get properties such as battery time remaining and other stats regarding the battery via wmi

 

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394074.aspx

 

a small application could be built to query a set of laptops and display the time remaining on each, gonna do some testing with powershell later if I get time

[HCC]

Resurrecting this old thread because I also have the same problem on some Dell latitude 2100 laptops. Wireless status would also be helpful. Are there any new suggestions for software or am I better off allowing the task tray?

[maniac]

Resurrecting this old thread because I also have the same problem on some Dell latitude 2100 laptops. Wireless status would also be helpful. Are there any new suggestions for software or am I better off allowing the task tray?

 

Actually wireless status would be a good one. I would happily allow the system tray if it wasn't full of other pointless icons that lead the kids into areas of the machine I'd rather they wern't poking around in. Companies like RM seem to have a way of controlling the system tray icons, but I've never found a foolproof way of doing this.

 

Mike.

[maniac]

Realising which thread this is - 2 years on and I actually found what I was looking for!

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/52597-handy-program-monitoring-laptop-battery-levels.html

 

Mike

[round2it]

is it net support school or lan school that now does battery monitoring? im sure i saw it somewhere