Whether you are a road warrior who cares much of your battery’s health or is just simply curious about it, check out BatteryBar. It sits beautifully on the taskbar indicating the percentage of battery juice left or time left depending on preference. Hovering it will reveal:

• Percent of battery juice left
• Capacity of battery – e.g 12,443 mWh of 17,294 mWh
• Charged rate – e.g 13,642mW
• Battery life left in time – e.g 0:34
• Full battery lifetime in time – e.g 1:00
• A/C – connected or disconnected
• Battery wear – e.g 700% of 57,720 mWh

Connected to AC power supply:

Discharging, disconnected from AC supply

Charging

Accuracy of information

Quoted from BatteryBar’s homepage:

BatteryBar constantly monitors the status of your battery as you use your laptop. As it monitors your battery, it keeps historical data on your battery and provide you with a very accurate estimate of how much time is remaining on your battery.

In short, the longer you have it installed, the more accurate it gets.

What’s cool: The battery wear information is really awesome. With the numbers shown, you can’t deny that you need a laptop battery replacement, or a new laptop even. Of course, unless your wallet disagrees.

What’s not: You see, the default Windows battery indicator won’t warn even if the battery juice hits rock bottom. Neither do BatteryBar, unless you upgrade to BatteryBar Pro ($3 to $10), which would also gives you a couple of extra settings.

P.s: Yes. My battery condition is that bad :/

©2011 SheepTech

BatteryBar: Detailed Information on Laptop’s Battery Life

Unfortunately, there are times where I was not satisfied with the wallpaper, and want the older wallpaper again, that I did not download earlier, but just set it as desktop background using the right click menu. Therefore, it is only possible for me to obtain the wallpaper again if only I could remember where I encountered it in the past.

One of the easiest way to solve the problem is to simply download the wallpaper to just any location on your local disk. But instead, I prefer to add all my favorite wallpapers to the local wallpaper directory on my Windows XP.

Once they are moved into the directory, the wallpapers will appear as one of the default wallpapers on the Display Properties (Right click on Desktop > Properties). To do so, just simply move your selected wallpapers to the wallpaper folder.

Windows XP – C:\WINDOWS\Web\Wallpaper\
Windows Vista – C:\Users\*User Name*\Appdata\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\

The next time you want to revert your wallpaper, you can just simply select it from the Display Properties window.

©2011 SheepTech

Add Default Wallpapers To Windows XP / Vista

If your kids still won’t listen even after all the nagging, you might want to just block the websites you don’t want them to visit. In just 3 simple steps, without any software downloading, you can block as many websites as you want easily.

Step 1
Click Start > Run. Type notepad C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts in the “Open:” field and click OK.

Step 2
A notepad will pop up. Find the line where it says “127.0.0.1 localhost”

Step 3
Immediately under the “127.0.0.1 localhost“, enter the website you want to block by using the format “127.0.0.1 webaddress.com”. For example, you want to block Google and Yahoo from being accessed:

You can block as many websites as you want, just make sure you only enter one URL per line. To remove the blocked websites, just simply remove the line and you are done.

Demo

Click on the icon for a full screen view.

©2011 SheepTech

How To Block Websites Without Software

Creating a Shutdown shortcut button

Traditionally, it takes at least 3 clicks before you can shut down your computer, Start > Turn off computer > Turn off. Creating a shutdown shortcut button will cut down the 3 clicks process into just one click. It seems that 2 more clicks would not make any difference, but if you are really in a rush, it may help.

There is a risk though having this shortcut button. If you are working on something important and you accidentally clicked on the button, there will be no confirmation prompt and your computer will shutdown without saving any of your work.

Step One
Right click on your desktop, New > Shortcut

Step Two
A “create shortcut” window will prompt. In the field, enter %windir%\System32\shutdown.exe -s (for instant shutdown, enter %windir%\System32\shutdown.exe -s -f -t 00)

Step Three
Enter a name of your choice for your shortcut. Basically a plain “Shutdown” will do. Click finish when you are done and your shortcut will be created on your desktop.

Step Four
By default, your shutdown shortcut button is without an icon. To change its icon, right click on your shutdown shortcut button and click Properties—and then click the Change Icon… button.

You can choose any icon you want, but there is actually a shutdown icon available.

Done. The next time you want to turn your computer off. You can do so by just clicking on the shortcut icon. If you don’t like to have the icon on your desktop, you can also move it to your quick launch bar. Just pull the icon to your quick launch bar and it will looks like this:

Tweak registry settings to kill process faster

Please do not proceed if you are not familiar in modifying registry as it will affect your system if it is not being done correctly. Following this tip will lower the timeout duration before killing a process on your computer.

Step One
Open Regedit by Start > Run > enter “regedit” > OK

Step Two
Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop, set AutoEndTasks to 1.

Step Three
At the same directory, find HungAppTimeout and WaitToKillAppTimeout. Set the value to your liking, 1000 = 1 second. Let’s say if you want the system to only wait 3 seconds before killing a process, set it to 3000.

Please tweak your register at your own risk. I will not be responsible when things turn bad.

©2011 SheepTech

Reduce Shutdown Time For Windows XP