BATExpert 1.14.5.27

Overview

BatExpert is a small utility designed to tell you the state of your battery – manufacturer data, charge status, charge rate, battery type, battery temperature and charge cycles and time estimated before the low level warning pops up.

It is a free utility that can warn you if your battery needs to be changed. If you have an old laptop and your battery powers off after an hour of work, there is a chance it might be living its last months. There is a common myth that you have to let your laptop battery charge and discharge completely; however, the lithium-ion batteries have an in-built mechanism that prevents them from being charged when they are full, so it is really not about that. They do have a limited number of cycles, though, and once they have exhausted it, they start losing health.

Installation

KCSoftwares have a number of products in our arsenal, and we keep downgrading them for the third-party bundles that come with otherwise harmless code. If you opt for download from the developer’s website, make sure you choose the Lite or Portable version, which are supposed to have no sponsors in the pack. You will have to click “Next” in the installation wizard, however, and that brings a third-party “verification of our partner’s disclosures,” whatever that means. I guess this is what you get when you want free software – it may come ad-supported.

Other than the bundles concern, the installation process is fast and simple – choose the language, destination folder and shortcuts.

BatExpert is Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8 / 8 64 bit OS-compatible.

Interface

BatExpert consists of a single window, which loads immediately after you launch the utility. The window is a simple display of your battery’s overall health:

Status – this section displays the battery’s charging level in percentage, just like your taskbar icon.

Voltage – the second indicator displaying information regarding the voltage in your system.

mW – this section shows the battery power and remaining time it will keep running.

Manufacturer – you will see the battery’s brand here.

Chemistry – the type of battery installed on your laptop.

Wear/Health – this section stands for the most important indicator because it displays its actual health, as estimated by the utility. The estimation is displayed in percentage and the lower the value, the worse is the battery’s health.

The last two sections are Temperature and Charge Cycles, and it would be nice if they actually displayed charge cycles and temperature, otherwise their presence is useless with N/A marker.

There are two more buttons – Drivers Update, which takes you to a third-party website where you can update your laptop’s drivers although we are not sure the source is clear, and Find New Battery, which is supposed to take you to Amazon site to buy a new battery for your laptop, but the link did not work in my case.

Pros

• Free utility
• Simple installation
• Does not consume much system resources
• Works fast
• Displays basic information about your laptop’s battery status and health

Cons

• The installer pack has bundles
• The indicators are not clickable and there is very little you can do with the interface, but look at it
• Temperature and charge cycles are N/A and as far as we can estimate they are N/A for pretty much every reviewer of BatExpert. Let us know if it works for you.
• The utility seems to be useless, since the basic information about your battery can be accessed from your taskbar by clicking on the Battery Icon.
• Even the fact that the utility is free does not make it a worthwhile download since there is not much use of it, but it brings third-party software with it.

Alternatives

Battery Optimizer is a laptop battery optimization and monitoring tool, which will help you get more life from your laptop's battery: battery-level, diagnostics and battery-optimizer. Turn Off Monitor quick tool icon- for instances when you need to save laptop battery while still running a task. Total Power Control icon- tray icon power plan changer for Windows 7, shutdown, restart, hibernate, sleep easily.

Conclusion

Overall, the utility is small and uninstalls politely, so you can give it a try, but there is a high probability it will tell you what you already know. There is no way to optimize battery performance, or squeeze any useful information since temperature and charge cycles are simply unavailable.