Simon Mackie

Recently the performance of the battery on my Windows XP laptop (a Dell XPS M1210, a great little ultraportable which has served me well for years) had got to the point where it really wasn’t worth running without it being plugged in.  So I didn’t notice that my power meter was missing from the taskbar until my new battery arrived in the post this morning and I wanted to check on its capacity.

“No problem,” I thought to myself, “I can check it out through the control panel instead, and restarting the machine will probably bring it back”. Unfortunately rebooting the machine didn’t bring the powermeter back. So I went off to Google in search of a solution.

The most commonly posted solution was to go to Power Options in the Control Panel (Start -> Control Panel -> Power options, or you can use Start->Run and then type “Powercfg.cpl”). Then go the Advanced tab and uncheck  “Always show icon in the taskbar”, click “Apply”, then re-check “Always show icon in the taskbar”, and click “Apply” again:

This seems to work for a lot of people. Unfortunately, not for me.

The next step was to remove Dell’s own power management software which I figured might be interfering with Windows’ power management features and, perhaps, was stopping the icon appearing. I removed Dell QuickSet, and restarted the machine. But still no joy!

I finally stumbled across a solution. For some reason,  I had checked “Show details for each battery” in the “Power Meter” tab of the Power Options panel, even though I have only one battery installed:

After unchecking this option and the panel should look like this:

After clicking OK and rebooting the computer, my power meter returned, hooray!

It took me a while to find that solution so hopefully this has saved you some fiddling. I have no idea why tat setting should interfere with the taskbar powermeter but apparently it does, at least on my machine.