How to get Battery MaxiMiser running on pre-A/T/X ThinkPads

[monty cantsin]

On older ThinkPad systems like the 570, 600 or 770 series, installing
the recommended "Battery MaxiMiser and Power Management features"
software package

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-44226

from IBM will only add some rather superfluous power management
properties, but not the Battery MaxiMiser itself. Also, when trying to
activate this application manually by starting it with the command

rundll32 pwrmonit.dll,StartPwrMonitor

a nice battery gauge will indeed appear on the taskbar, but
unfortunately the display will not change and thus it won't show the
actual battery level, only the charge status at the time the
application has been started.

If you can live without the aforementioned power management property
pages (the settings they refer to can still be altered in the BIOS
setup), you might want to take a look at another revision of the
"Battery MaxiMiser and Power Management features" package tailored to
a different range of systems, as can be found here:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-44224

This software (although not officially released for these systems)
will install fine on some older, pre-A/T/X ThinkPad systems and will
provide them with a functioning Battery MaxiMiser application and
battery gauge in the taskbar, just as it is common with the newer
systems. It lacks the function to read out extended battery
information, as this is not wholly supported on the older machines,
but I don't regard that as a major drawback.

Best regards,
Monty