There are various utilities to monitor the battery, but BatteryMon is a tool that pops up in many overviews as an excellent program to monitor your battery status. What can you do with this software?
BatteryMon provides a lot of information about your battery right from the installation, but you can dig much deeper to discover potential issues. But we start from the beginning. Download the program on this page from software maker PassMark. It is a lightweight piece of software with a little more than 1 MB, it requires no installation and you can use the basic version for personal use for free.
When you start the monitoring tool, a graph of the battery status is displayed. Based on the discharge, it calculates how much time your battery has left before it is completely empty. You can see here whether it is hanging from the power cable or receiving energy from the battery, what the battery status is, the percentage of remaining energy, how much time is still available, how much time has passed since the start of the monitoring and how long it has been runs on the battery. It only starts measuring from the start of the application. With Run> Stop you can stop monitoring and with Run> Start crank up again.
With a good battery, the battery is running steadily and you see the line drop at the same interval in the graph that appears in the main window. With a sudden fall down and a curved curve instead of a fairly straight line, something is not quite right anymore with the battery.
The tool also provides information about the battery that you are using Info> Battery information. Here you can see the chemical make-up of the battery (usually Li-Ion in modern laptops), the design capacity of the battery, the current capacity, the serial number and more. This is useful information if, for example, you want to register the RMA battery with a manufacturer.
The field is also important Battery Temperature. A normal range is between 20 and 40 degrees Celsius. A typical temperature is around 35 degrees. High temperatures are disastrous for batteries with a lithium composition and therefore most modern systems will, for example, stop charging as soon as a battery temperature of 45 degrees is measured.
By clicking twice on the graph, you go to mini mode. The simple display of battery power then comes in the system tray (bottom right in the taskbar). You can take it out of the fold-out box (with the up arrow to the left of the Windows tray) and drag it to a more visible position so that it is always available. By double-clicking on it, the main window appears.
For diagnostic purposes, it is useful to ensure that BatteryMon starts automatically when Windows starts and that you create a log file. Go to for that Edit> Configuration. By on Browse clicking an explorer window opens. Navigate to the folder where you want to save the log file, name the file, and then click To open.
The log file can handle 1000 lines, which means that you can look back a little more than fifteen minutes in the log in the standard configuration. A record is created every second. By increasing the interval – for simple work that does not start from very sudden dips, you do not need such fine-meshed logs – to, for example, 30 seconds, you increase the length of time in which you can search back. With that interval you end up with more than 80 hours of indexing.
With Info> View log the program opens the log file. That is a csv file of the time stamps and measured values ​​as in the main window. These logs remain intact when you stop monitoring and are therefore useful for looking back in the longer term. That is why a measuring interval of 60 seconds is not a bad idea, so you monitor almost 17 hours before the first line is overwritten.
In addition, you ensure that logging starts automatically by checking both Run BatteryMon at start up as Start sampling when run. You can also place a check at Start mini BatteryMon when run, so that it automatically appears in the tray. That way, you hardly notice anything else, but the program is always available if you want to explore.
Please note that these changes apply to the entire tool, not just logging to the text file. You see in the Num samples in the main window the enumeration add up to one number higher per half minute, instead of one per second. This should not have any further consequences for the curve itself.