When travelling, you might be more concerned than usual over how much power is left in your laptop battery. With this in mind, a quick and handy visual tool is available, free for home use, from Matt Collinge – called Power Meter Plus.

Currently up to version 1.6.1, Power Meter Plus, is a small utility that not only presents a visual indicator of your battery life (presented on the desktop), but can also offer various warnings set against a number of thresholds – to give you a better chance of finding a power outlet in sufficient time. A useful feature of the application is the indicators ability to flip sides of the screen when it feels it might be getting in the way of your work (although you can set this to simply hide the meter).

Power Meter Plus should run on Windows versions up to Vista, to learn more and get the utility visit Power Meter Plus.