As Apple and consumers move more and more to portables as their primary machines, the health of the rechargeable battery in the unit becomes more and more an issue. There are many tools available to monitor your battery and its health—how do you monitor it?
Apple has included a simple battery monitor display in the menu bar since OS 8. The relative charge percentage or approximate run time left in the battery are two variables that frequently change depending on exactly what you are doing with the computer. The hardware information of the battery, build and firmware information, capacity, cycle count, health and amperage output along with other statistics can be viewed in the Hardware section of System Profiler, under “Power.”
The information that System Profiler provides can also be viewed in Terminal by using the ioreg command. One of the many commands in Terminal to look at your battery performance is:
ioreg -l | grep Capacity
Much like System Profiler, the Terminal application and command is a snapshot of the performance at the time you hit enter on the command.
What choices do you have if you want dynamic tracking of the battery and its performance? One of the more common applications I have seen on customer machines in the past (and that we’ve mentioned) is Coconut Battery.
The free app is a modest 1.5MB in size and provides real-time information on your battery. Like System Profiler and Terminal, Coconut Battery is an App window unto its own. It adds clutter to your display in its small window. It provides information regarding current charge, original capacity and current maximum charge. It also provides some system information about your computer, model of your machine, age of your computer and battery load cycles. It is not a static look of the battery and provides regular updates regarding the batteries key statistics.
Of the applications I have found for battery monitoring though, Mac Data Recoveries Battery Guru is the one I like the most. This lightweight app functions as a Menu bar add-on. It does not run as an application in its own window, but rather a clean drop down. It provides the same data as provided by all the other apps mentioned and includes another key piece of information: Current Usage.
The Current Usage is a real-time monitor of the output of the battery. You can monitor the Current Usage and monitor when your battery is under higher levels of stress. When you no longer need the information (such as when it’s plugged in), you can select Quit from the drop down and it disappears from the menu bar. Battery Guru absorbs a mere 369KB of disk space on your machine. Watching its processes in Activity Monitor, I have never seen Battery Guru use a significant percentage of processing power. Its footprint in memory was also smaller than CoconutBattery when activated.
What do you use to monitor your battery?