More people are taking battery life into account when they purchase a new electronic product doesn’t matter what gadgets they buy if it involves battery performance the longer the better. This is particular true when you buy a new Netbook or a Laptop. More products are rolling out high battery life, and more people are demanding longer battery life on their product. It’s true that with a 12 cell battery on a Netbook it can probably last over 12 hr. But we all know that battery gets decay overtime, and the battery you are getting now compare to a month ago when its new will definitely be different.  So how different will it be ?

There are few different ways you can monitor and measure your battery. In Windows 7 there is a new command utility tool that you can use to generate a report of your battery capacity information. However, the report only shows a limited information of your battery health status.

BatteryBar is another nice utility that does the real time battery monitor for you. With some of the additional feature such as

• Discharge Rate/Charge Rate
• Estimated Full battery Lifetime:
• Battery Wear %

Here you can see that when your laptop is on battery with the BatteryBar tool you can see the time remaining in green, the battery’s current capacity 44167 mWh out of 75746 mWh, the discharge rate and the Battery Wear.

So what do those measurement mean ?

The Percent is the calculation of the current battery capacity divided the total battery capacity.

The Discharge Rate is the output of the current that are currently going from the battery to power the machine. In my case it is currently using 16650 mW per hour. You can do the math, use this number to divide the total capacity that will get you the estimated battery life time for your battery. Also, keep in mind that the Discharge Rate will always fluctuate depending on how much power the OS is required to perform the current task. In my case, I set it to power saver mode, if you change this to high performance you will see a dramatically increase in the discharge rate. That case there will be more power draw out from your battery but at the same time, battery life decreases.

Lastly what’s the Battery Wear ?

Battery Wear is simply the ratio of the current full capacity / factory designed capacity. (ie. battery wear tells you how much % your battery has decayed over time)

Since my battery is brand new, I expect this ratio to be 0% however, if your battery isn’t new you might see a whole range of number depending on the usage of your battery.

When you are charging the bar will now turn to blue and showing the time remaining to complete the change.

Download the BatteryBar here