I have a problem with my laptop: it doesn’t provide sufficient warning when the battery is about to die. Yes, there is a tiny indicator icon in the systems tray, but who the hell’s going to notice something this small in the corner of the screen when they’re busy working? 
Inevitably a low-battery warning appears in the middle of the screen, and half a second later, the laptop shuts down.
Does anyone know how I can increase the warning time? It’d be nice to have more than half a second to go running for the plug.
Even a gigantic battery idicator would be better than this. Thanks.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/russel_02march25.mspx
IIRC, you could set both the levels for the two layers of warnings and what warnings happen then. But I’m not entirely sure about the levels. So if you can’t choose these and your notebook battery reports wrong values to the OS, you should probably look for other tools…
Thanks, Guido. I’ve tinkered with those power and alarm settings before. I set the alarm to sound when the batter reaches 16%, but I have yet to hear an alarm or see a message displayed at 16%. So I don’t know what’s going on there (I have sound and text notification selected). I just reset it for 25%, and made some of adjustments. We’ll see what happens. Thanks again.
Looks like I need other tools — the XP ‘alarm’ settings don’t work.
Did you google battery monitoring software?
- http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~ashok/akwhat.html
- http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/System_Analysis_Utilities/What__Laptop_Battery___System_Monitor.html