Battery Level in XP?

bobbyt · Jul 26, 2006

Is there a way to enable some type of battery level indicator in XP while running it under Parallels Desktop???

You know, so when I'm in full screen I can see how much power my battery has without having to reveal mac os x???

rjgebis · Jul 26, 2006

Same problem here. I did requested this to support team a while ago. But I did not get answer on this subject yet.

Bi-Polar · Jul 27, 2006

There maybe a program at www.versiontracker.com I'll look around for one.

dkp · Jul 27, 2006

rjgebis said:
Same problem here. I did requested this to support team a while ago. But I did not get answer on this subject yet.

I hope they don't wast a single minute of their lives on this. It is absurd. There is a battery monitor in the host os which is but a click away from any guest os. And if you run your guest OS in a window you don't even need to click anything.

There are real issues they can be working on and this isn't one of them.

dp

unused_user_name · Jul 27, 2006

I think this could be done with existing tools that are already out there. The good folks at parallels probably don't have to do anything.

All you have to do it find a Mac remote-monitoring solution that measures battery life (or make a perlscript that does it) ... then you need a windows GUI that reads the information.

I've got too much on my plate right now to spend time on that, but from what I understand using a combination of cron and applescript could make the server, send the information through the "fake" network card to the VM, and have a GUI client in say Java on the XP side to read the info.

I don't think this is something that Parallels needs to do. It's the same problem you would have if you were managing a remote OS X server and wanted to read the status of your UPS backup battery.

bobbyt · Jul 31, 2006

dkp said:
I hope they don't wast a single minute of their lives on this. It is absurd. There is a battery monitor in the host os which is but a click away from any guest os. And if you run your guest OS in a window you don't even need to click anything.

There are real issues they can be working on and this isn't one of them.

dp

Well, personally I think they shouldn't be giving linux priority with Parallels Tools features over Windows 98, but there are a ton of people who disagree with me, including parallels at this point... Just because you personally see no benefits to a feature doesn't mean you need to attack the opinion of thoes who do...

And if seeing the battery level (in full screen mode) is only a 'click away', can you please inform me as to where this "click" is supposed to occur??? As of now I have to exit full screen mode to see my battery level, as I know of no other way to get the menu bar visible... And using this method right now takes around 20 to 30 seconds (to cycle out of & back in to full screen mode again). Doing that every few minutes, especially when the battery is beginning to get low, ends up being a major time waster (10 cycles of doing this can waste up to 5 minutes of time)...
And when taking time into account, especially when running on a battery, time is generally at a premium...

bobbyt · Jul 31, 2006

unused_user_name said:
I think this could be done with existing tools that are already out there. The good folks at parallels probably don't have to do anything.

All you have to do it find a Mac remote-monitoring solution that measures battery life (or make a perlscript that does it) ... then you need a windows GUI that reads the information.

I've got too much on my plate right now to spend time on that, but from what I understand using a combination of cron and applescript could make the server, send the information through the "fake" network card to the VM, and have a GUI client in say Java on the XP side to read the info.

I don't think this is something that Parallels needs to do. It's the same problem you would have if you were managing a remote OS X server and wanted to read the status of your UPS backup battery.

Well, if that's all it would take...

yikes...

Not to mention both sides would require extra CPU cycles & memory space to supplement this...

bobbyt · Aug 3, 2006

bobbyt said:
And if seeing the battery level (in full screen mode) is only a 'click away', can you please inform me as to where this "click" is supposed to occur???

What do you know, I finally found it. Opiton-F4 seems to reveal the menu bar over the full screen windows (allowing me to see the battery)...

Of course, I still think it would be nice to get the default windows battery indicator on the windows toolbar...

But I'll take what I can get...

[edit]
And I just figured out why it works... Apparently it brings the sound preferences up in Mac OS X, but the actual window is behind the full screen parallels... Which now leaves me wondering if in fact this is a bad thing to do (perhaps equivalent to using the Apple Menu in Parallels???)