Battery testing utility?

[gurachn]

In addition to my stock Dell 1100 battery, I have a number of spares I bought off ebay.
They all seem reasonably similar in charge life, but I am curious to see exactly how they compare in ability to hold a charge.

Anyone know of any utility I can use to measure battery life/charge on my x51v (running WM6.1)?
Any suggestions appreciated.

[Zaniax]

Try acbPowerMeter - it's free

[gurachn]

Thanks for that Zaniax.
It looks like a great app for tracking power usage, especially to see how much power is being used by wifi, etc, but is it able to note the total power output for a battery?

It seems like it might be necessary to run exactly the same programs for the same length of time using different batterys in order to guage the capacity of each.
Is this correct?

I was really looking for a utility that could measure the full capacity of a battery without necessarily fully running it down, so that I could easily see how my ebay specials compared to the stock dell.

[Zaniax]

Actually you don't have to run your batteries totally down to figure out the capacity.
acbPowerMeter shows the mAh value over time.

Make a search on this site for "acbPowerMeter" posted by Zaniax to find out.

Or ask again ... :o

[gurachn]

Thanks for the reply Zaniax.
I couldn't find the post you are refering to, but I did manage to find some others related to acbPowerMeter.
If I understand correctly, the procedure is to start with 100% charge, run some applications to put a medium load on the device (maybe tcpmp with a looping music vid?) then start acbPowerMeter and take the Ax of the cradle.
Let it run for some time, say down to half power or so then use the total mA usage to extrapolate the total capacity of the battery?

I was kinda hoping for a utility that would just automatically tell me the full capacity of the battery without any effort on my part, but I am just a lazy bugger, I guess.

Thanks again for your help.