BattStat 0.99 - Battery Status monitor and power management freeware for 
Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000 x86/x64 http://users.rcn.com/tmtalpey/BattStat/

When I first got my Fujitsu T90D (P5010-equivalent), I moved away from 
using Sony 505 and Z505 models. The only thing I missed was PowerPanel, 
their semi-proprietary Phoenix-based power app. The single most useful 
thing that program does is to monitor battery usage and make a true 
estimate of runtime. The second most useful thing is to select power 
profiles, and control things like CPU speed and screen brightness. 

The Fujitsu provided functions which, to me, were a shade of this 
formerly essential support. The battery, while accurate, basically 
provided fixed runtime estimates, which were not adaptive in any 
meaningful way. The Hotkey utility dimmed the screen, but did little 
else in the way of power management. I missed PowerPanel! 

So, as a hobby I decided to code up a replacement. It's not perfect but 
I'm rather proud of it, and I'm experimenting with sharing it by making 
it available for download as freeware. 

I call it "BattStat", and it's a systray application which uses the 
smart battery support in Windows 7, Vista, XP and 2000 to monitor power 
usage, battery charge, CPU speed, CPU usage, and power events such as 
standby/hibernate/resume, battery events, etc. Additionally, it's 
capable of monitoring CPU temperature (via Intel Core internal sensors, 
or ACPI thermal sensors), hard drive temperature (if the drive supports 
it), and even control traditional hard drive APM/AAM/spindown settings, 
like the Hitachi PowerBooster does. The binary is about 320KB and though 
it comes with an installer, it requires no special installation, dll's, 
etc. It can be autorun from the registry with a checkbox. It can run 
with or without administrator privileges, though certain functions will 
be disabled without it. 

The systray icon resembles PowerPanel rather strongly, but integrates 
battery capacity, AC power status, and CPU speed in a single icon. It 
has a graphical display window that can be popped up on-demand, which 
graphs up to 8 parameters over a several hour period, and shows 
instantaneous status in a window (which is also available in a systray 
tooltip). It estimates runtime when discharging, and charge time when 
charging. It displays instantaneous and long-term average power usage. 

In addition to the systray and main window graph, it has a toolbar-style 
window that can float anywhere on the screen which compactly integrates 
the systray icon, a charge meter and summary of runtime. 

It has a programmable hotkey to turn off the screen, which can be used 
to save significant power when running on battery if you need to turn 
away for a short time, it's also nice as a "privacy key" if you need to 
blank your screen instantly. The program can run a program or batch file 
any time the system switches power source, or resumes from standby or 
hibernation, something I find useful to perform certain checks 
automatically to recover state that many programs blissfully ignore. 

There's a detailed battery display for up to two batteries, with names, 
voltages, temperature, design capacities, wear percentages, etc, as 
provided by the batteries themselves. 

Finally, it can switch Win7/Vista power plans and XP/2000 power schemes 
with a single click, as well as standby and hibernate the system. 
