If your battery routinely dies in the middle of a meeting when it claims to still have 20 percent of its life remaining, then it’s miscalibrated. That’s not a joke in the style of “if you have more than 5 dogs on your porch, then you’re a redneck.” It’s an observation that your battery is lying to you. You can fix that, though: BatteryCare is a free utility that can help optimize your laptop battery.
BatteryCare is yet another entry in the increasingly crowded battery utility arena, but it has some cool features that make it stand out. The program monitors your laptop’s cycle of charges and discharges, for example, and warns you when you should perform a full discharge. This can help calibrate the battery and keep its time remaining indication honest.
It also reports detailed information about your battery - wear level, capacity, manufacturer information, and more. If you ever wanted to know the design capacity and actual current capacity of your battery, this is the place to go.
And like some other battery utilities we’ve written about in the past, like Aerofoil and BattCursor, BatteryCare can automatically switch power profiles and disable Aero Glass when you’re on battery power.
Just between you and me, though, my money is still on Aerofoil - it works like a charm, and has no cumbersome dialog boxes or configurations to slow me down.
