Laptop battery monitor??

I have a new HP Compaq laptop and the battery meter is in % which really doesn't tell me much. So I am looking for a battery meter that tells me how much time I have on battery power. I have looked at a few sidebar gadgets and couldn't find anything and Google really isn't helping me either so I thought I would ask here after 2 weeks of research and coming up empty like my battery.

Please remember the time remaining is never accurate. Your laptop battery consumption is dynamic, not static.

Kari

Personally, I think that reporting battery charge level as a percentage is more useful than the amount of time remaining. Think of it like a car petrol gauge. That shows the amount of fuel remaining in the tank, just like the percentage of charge left in the battery. If it showed the estimated number of miles that you could travel before refueling, then it would be constantly going up and down according to the speed that you are travelling. In the same way, if you have the remaining battery charge shown as the estimated time remaining, then this will fluctuate in the same way according to the load placed on your system.

Some systems report the battery charge level as a percentage, others as estimated time remaining and still others can report it both ways. This all depends on the system, the monitoring circuitry in the system and the associated driver.

Then I guess my laptop doesn't have that ability. That really sucks, I like time for when I am sitting in the hospital surfing the net while they give me meds. I can't think clearly with the painkillers and muscle relaxers I have to take daily. Most my Tech skills are out the door a few hours after waking up.

for example, I had to clean out the fan port on this laptop, some lint go in there, well I had to wait almost an hour for my muscle relaxer to ware off before I could get the power ribbon back in its slot cause I couldn't focus my eyes.

Thanks for the info about how the battery reports info, I didn't think it was more then software guessing what time was avail. Never really looked into how hardware works in laptops figured it would be similar to desktops and this is only my second non Mac laptop, I always had home built PC desktop rigs and had 3 Mac laptops.