Thinkpads Forum

Out of the blue the green and black battery guage, the one to the immediate left of the system tray, is missing. I've searched for an answer, reinstalled power management and changed screen resolutions with no joy. Any ideas would be appreciated.


TP61/p Windows XP Pro

It seems silly to ask it, but have you made sure it is now configured to show up in the Task Bar? Open Power Manager from the Start menu (under ThinkVantage group). Then go to the Global Power Settings tab, and click Options button down at the bottom. Make sure it is enabled to display in the Task Bar. It is possible that uninstalling/reinstalling won't affect that particular setting.

bdmclacken wrote:It seems silly to ask it, but have you made sure it is now configured to show up in the Task Bar?

Not silly to ask at all, but alas, it's checked. I even toggled it, but no change. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Changed themes, went to Classic and back to XP, still no guage.

I decided to look at some other TP's registries to see any differences, and I found 2 concerning power that were missing from this machine: PWRMGRTR and BLOG.

I used regedit to add the following to HKLM\Software\Micrsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run

New String Value named PWRMGRTR

String is rundll32.exe C:\PROGRA~1\ThinkPad\UTILIT~1\PWRMGRTR.DLL,PwrMgrBkGndMonitor

I don't know where it went, but it obviously is supposed to be there. I didn't do any registry editing, but I had installed AnyDVD. Something got screwed up in the registry, because I don't think the TaskBar applet can run without this item in the registry.

I added the Battery logging entry as well:

New String Value named BLOG
String is rundll32.exe C:\PROGRA~1\ThinkPad\UTILIT~1\BatLogEx.DLL,StartBattLog

It's working again. I wish I could understand why it stopped, but from Google, I know I'm not alone.