Microsoft's updated Windows battery indicator rollout runs out of juice Microsoft has halted the rollout of a revamped battery indicator to Windows 11 Insiders in the Release Preview Channel. A gradual rollout of the feature began last week as part of build 26100.3321. Windows has had a battery indicator for a while; the tweak in the update was meant to add some color so users could make a …
Or perhaps there were too many colors for the marketing team to assimilate. After all, the Flatso style guide only allows for black, white and maybe two shades of grey, so actual color might be too much for the addled to handle, and so they withdrew it so they could clean up after the collective heads of their marketing dept. exploded.
[/sarcasm on] ... Microsoft realised that this may actually be a useful addition to W11
... or else M$ programmers actually broke the simple bit of coding that is a battery level indicator [/sarcasm off]
But seriously, only M$ could make a complete hash of a simple piece of code.
My laptop has a simple white icon (on a dark blue background for me) and when it gets down to 10% the screen goes darker and it pops up a warning that the battery is low. How complicated can it be?
> M$ programmers actually broke the simple bit of coding
Which was already done for deduplication+NTFS in specific nested-V scenarios, which they probably won't fix until I reproduce it in a non-nested-V scenario (they could reproduce that for nested). But I don't have so much time (aka real life exists too).
Which was already done for game compatibility (like Delta Force 1 & 2)...
Which was already done for long path support within Powershell ISE
There are TONS of undiscovered or "we don't care" bugs in that OS. What I really worry about is that Server 2025 has the same code base.
It's helpful to review the history of everything happening in the past ... for example here's a very old quote that indicates how little we might expect ...
"Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the most reliable Windows ever. To me, this is like saying that asparagus is the most articulate vegetable ever." - Dave Barry
I'm still using Windows 7 Professional everywhere - these days "no updates" keeps everything working fine.
When will people stop using red and green to distinguish between two important things? A total of 8% of European Caucasian men (including me) are red–green colourblind. This is not a small number of people (and there are also smaller percentages of other groups). So many electronic gadgets I have seem to use something like amber and green to indicate charging status, and to my eyes, the two shades are all but indistinguishable. This can be incredibly frustrating, and in some cases potentially dangerous.* There does seem to have been some move towards red and blue, which is major progress (even if the blue can be a bit painfully bright), but red and green just seems to be the thoughtless default.
*Before you ask, no, traffic lights are not usually a problem because the "green" they use (at least in the UK) is actually almost white to my eyes and stands out notably from the red. The red and amber do usually look identical to me, but that's less of an issue.
I always find it interesting that on the colour spectrum, green and blue are adjacent, but red is at the other end.
However for a reasonable percentage of the population, red & green are virtually the same whereas red & blue are completely different. Green-blue depends heavily on shades.
(plus if colour vision deficiency were a race/ethnicity/gender choice, it would be far more accommodated in legislation)
It's all about the cones. In honesty, human colour vision is stupidly designed. Nobody would come up with something so vague if they had to start from scratch. Still, it means we can ridiculously trick our eyes into believing that monitors and TVs can show the full spectrum to us when in fact they can only show three small bits of it in varying proportions!
Well, no. It is about the selection which colors of the spectrum (some insects can see 11 separate colors), versus being able to see good at night (dogs are red-green color blind, others completely), versus having a sharp picture, versus being able to see very far, versus having a narrow or wide FOV, versus how big the eye can be without scarifying other things, like speed of information transfer due to bigger head / body and how much data can be processed.
So you have several characteristics, of which I probably missed more. And since we are THE dominant species here it must have been the right compromise.
It's wrong to assume human vision is the "best" compromise of vision factors simply because we are the dominant lifeform on this planet.
We achieved that dominance by using the daylight hours to create parking lots and shopping malls, resulting in many-fewer humans being eaten by tigers than previously.
Evolution is a form of design: genetic algorithms have been used in the design of CPUs for a long time. I guess what I perceive as stupid design is therefore probably just a way to minimise energy or some other cost while providing the minimum functionality necessary for ongoing survival of our DNA. A more complex/accurate system would probably be too evolutionarily expensive.
Interestingly, there is a (surprisingly old but not yet debunked) theory that colourblindness evolved as a positive adaptive strategy to enhance the ability of humans to detect camouflaged objects/creatures.
Green / Amber LEDs have been the bane of my existence. I is infuriating trying to set up a device and not knowing wether the blinking pattern you see is the "good one" (green) or "bad one" (yellow) because they are indistinguishable from one another. Usually looking at them through a phone camera works, but sheesh! is it not like there are no other color options.
As a kind of funny aside, the green traffic light in some US places look basically blue to me. Not sure if it your case but I always found it amusing (and great, as they are impossible to miss)
Worry not. Give it a few weeks a Trump will order all US traffic lights changed to red, white, and blue. And red will be at bottom and mean 'go'. Anyone who doesn't like the BIGLIEST MOST BEST PATRIOT traffic signals is a SAD LOSER who HATES THE USA!
Now, where's that Emperor Trump icon...? Settled on pirates because he's more buckaneering mob boss than presidential at this point.
China under Mao actually redefined the meaning of the traffic lights, changing Red to mean go ... (i think in the 60s or maybe 70s)
Anyone who has been to China since will know what a success that was ,,,
(Red once again means stop )
[ 25 aug 1966 apparently ]
I was working on one of those new-fangled Cisco SD-WAN routers that had a bi-colour power LED.
The router was not working and the manual said the valid colours were Off, Green, or red/amber (can't remember which).
it was glowing a rather fetching salmon pink!
(and, no, I'm not colourblind)
> green traffic light in some US places look basically blue to me.
There was a short time of green-blue traffic lights, like the one you describe, in Germany as well. They are gone now since it irritated too many people, took attention off the road - same reasons why you won't see billboards along the roads here.
"As a kind of funny aside, the green traffic light in some US places look basically blue to me."
Here in the UK, the green traffic lights seem to lean a bit more towards blue since the switch over the LEDs. Also worth noting in some cultures, they don't have separate words for blue and green, they are just variations of the same colour. So be careful who you are teasing when you ask them what colour the sky is on their planet. They might just say "green". And be correct :-)
I don't know that there are any combinations of LEDs that won't be a problem for some variety of color blindness. (I don't know what kind you have that makes yellow and green LEDs look the same and green traffic lights sometimes look blue. There seems to be a lot of variations of vision among people both in colors they see and how well their night vision is. I can't seem to convince a friend that I can see perfectly fine in light that to him is was too dim.
Depends how bad it is too. I'm apparently red/green colour blind, but the only time's I've noticed it are in an Ishihara test*, or if there's two similarly bright red & green items in a very dark room. If I'd not been told I'm colourblind, I'd never know.
*the arrangement of dots that you use to find out how colourblind you are
Apologies in advance for any earworms that are induced by these
According to Billy Ocean... Red light spells danger...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW66keO8Iew
Can someone help Nena with counting the Red balloons...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiwgOWo7mDc
Nearly forgot...
"because the "green" they use (at least in the UK)"
I don't know whether it's a UK or EU rule, but several years ago they started replacing the green lamps with bluish green ones for this exact reason. Green enough to look green to people expecting to see green, and not-green enough for people who can't tell them apart from the red ones.
Oh, that would make sense. I'd noticed that certain relatively new LED-based traffic lights had "greens" that were *far* more bluish than traditional ones, to the extent that they were verging on being cyan rather than actual green.
I'd wondered why that was, but it hadn't occurred to me there might be a reason like that for it.
This is simply not true: perhaps you're getting confused with yellow/blue colourblindness. In both those with deuteranopia and those with protanopia, blue is very easy to distinguish from red, amber, or green. It may present problems for those with tritanopia (blue/yellow colourblindness), but they would likely already have been having trouble with red and green. Furthermore, tritanopia only affects less than 0.01% of people worldwide compared to around 5% who have the red/green forms.
Even if using red/blue were to cause problems for tritanopes, this would mean a change from 1 in 20 people having a problem to 1 in 10,000.
There's nothing wrong with using red and green to distinguish things as long as the user has the freedom to change the colours to whatever they would like (a patch or a sed command that modifies only a colour hex value probably will keep working unmodified in later versions too).
As always, the solution is to switch to free software.
The topic was software.
In the case of configurable RGB LEDs, software makes the difference.
Physically replacing through hole or even surface mount LEDs in a device, with LEDs of a different colour is feasible and doesn't take too long, unlike reverse engineering a sufficiently bloated proprietary program to work out which bytes need to be changed to change the display colour.
> Physically replacing through hole or even surface mount LEDs in a device, with LEDs of a different colour is feasible and doesn't take too long
Not that simple, keep in mind (current = 20 mA):
IR LED ~1.25 V (this is why they work with only one AA battery, important for some mice and remote controls)
Red LED ~1.7 V
Orange ~ 1.9 V (pure, not red-green-mix type, expensive though, mix red-green is cheaper)
Green ~2.2 V
Yellow ~2.4 V (pure, not red-green-mix type, expensive though? Missing confirmation sources of actual mass produced pure yellow LED, and today they use UV-blue with a phosphor-convert since cheaper?)
Blue ~2.7 V (usually 2.8 V at 30 mA since our eyes are not very sensitive to blue)
White ~3.0 V (actually low UV band / high blue band with phosphor to convert to "white". Some have that phosphor external, see the right two philips example here. If you take off that cover you see blue, but a variant that triggers UV reactions like glasses getting dark. Don't look too long into that "blue" type of LED...)
UV ~3.7 V (some cameras, like in phones, can pick that up, but not the human eye. Unless you hit a surface which reacts to it.)
So if you switch the LED color to direction red, the LED might not live long, could even be insta-death. If you switch to direction blue, you might lose brightness. There are some LED with built-in current limiter, for a price. But the circuits around that LED must be then designed for that type, else you end up with dim LEDs.
If one can't distinguish between amber (yellow) and green, why is the condition called red-green colour-blindness?
As a child, I would see industrial motor controls with two unlabeled buttons: one black, and the other red. I could not figure out whether pushing the red button would create danger (by turning the motor on), or pushing the red button would stop the danger (by turning the motor off).
As with iconography, color-coding is arbitrary and must be learned.
"why is the condition called red-green colour-blindness"
It's an unhelpful colloquialism. People with deuteranopia or protanopia would more accurately be called "green blind" and "red blind", respectively. It's not simply about distinguishing colours; it would be more accurate to say that those with certain forms of colourblindness have difficulty accurately perceiving specific ranges of colours, meaning that they can be mistaken for others. Interestingly, I have trouble telling blue from purple, despite being severely deuteranopic (green blind).
Sounds similar to my issues. Maybe try this test: https://www.colorlitelens.com/color-blindness-test.html#Redgreen
They will break it. Way too often you have to use Get-CimInstance Win32_QuickFixEngineering already, add Get-CimInstance Win32_Battery.
If you want better readability (yes two batteries in here, Fujitsu E746, and with AC plugged in endless runtime - and TheRegister kills some spaces on that table where they should not):
PS C:\> Get-CimInstance Win32_Battery | Select-Object Name,DeviceID,Status,@{Name="Power";Expression={if ($_.BatteryStatus -eq "1") {"1:Batt"};if ($_.BatteryStatus -eq "2") {"2:AC"}}},EstimatedChargeRemaining,EstimatedRunTime | ft
Name DeviceID Status Power EstimatedChargeRemaining EstimatedRunTime
---- -------- ------ ----- ------------------------ ----------------
CP700282-02 01A-Z170523015519ZFujitsuCP700282-02 OK 2:AC 100 71582788
CP709256-01 01A-W160220009833WFujitsuCP709256-01 OK 2:AC 100 71582788
The icon shows one summary for both batteries and the estimated run time. Below are separate indicators for "Battery 1" and "Battery 2" showing the percentage for each. But: Server 2022 is on that Laptop, aka "clean version" of Windows, not Windows 11. Current estimated run time (batteries full) is >18h. On a not-so-new laptop. I "needed" the second battery since that laptop is also used to control most of the solar stuff with powershell, and I "needed" it to be able to get through a long and dark night (i.e. German winter) completely on battery. Of course it switches to AC automatically before it runs out.
Realistic more like 12 hours run time since I started using it way more than previously every expected by myself, even for gaming like Endless Sky, 'cause 4k screen with 60 Hz works fine, so why not.
They realised they weren't being 'disruptive' enough and needed to change the ol' RAG status to Cyan, black and magenta, create a downloadable app from the Microsoft store for it (500Mb), hide the setting 14 layers down in the control panel under hardware or via copilot request. And it'll only work with an internet connection
I wouldn't have thought a battery charger indicator would be top of the list.
Might be easier to have the hardware designers add a multicoloured LED or LCD display that the platform firmware can control bypassing the MS clownware.
I am sure in future copilot enabled hardware will voice prompt the user in its best Jeeves RS with "Would sir [madam] please connect the power adaptor before I am unable to provide further satisfaction?"†
Actually after a full dose of Win11/Copilot/MS-AI I suspect the very much want to see happen would be pretty much along the lines of "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.‡"
† I just realised this sounds more like an AI enhanced sex toy with a voice interface. I am sure there is PFY beavering away in his parents' basement with some Raspberry Pi SOCs to make this the next big thing. Surprised that Apple, considering its target demographic, hasn't already penetrated this market.
‡ HHGTTG Sirius Cybernetics Corporation which every major Tech corporate seemingly wants to emulate. Douglas Adams... such prescience!
I'd settle for my laptop properly handing being plugged into my docking station - instead of it not sending anything to the docking-station-connected screens, the laptop screen staying black, and forcing me to force-shutdown the machine (losing any open files) just to use it.
They'll get these connection bugs worked out within a year or two of the introduction of docking stations, right???
>and forcing me to force-shutdown the machine (losing any open files)
Have you tried setting the power button action to Hibernate? Perhaps hibernating the laptop, then waking it up again, would trigger it into detecting the dock-attached monitors? And would prevent data loss.
The ability to configure what the power & sleep buttons do is rather hidden in Windows 10/11; try typing "powercfg.cpl" at a command prompt as the quickest way to get to it.
I guess they recalled it because the calculation of the remaining charge (all done by CoPilot based on Recall-generated screendumps) did not match the actual value.
Then people were surprised by a sudden shutdown while still "in the green".
No really, how hard can this feature be? It is not that laptops are new to the market, are they?
Let alone how "new" that feature is - Windows 2000, as long as the PC is ACPI / APM capable, could do it.
For Windows 2000, to display the power status indicator on task bar:
Open the Start menu and choose Settings, Control Panel, Power Options.
Click the Advanced tab.
Select the Always Show Icon On The Taskbar check box.
and Win 11 is the biggest pile of shite I've ever had the misfortune to use.
I lost hours today because an exe I was trying to run on the command line kept spawning a GUI window with a message that the program was not compatible (it was installed as part of Visual Studio). A window that I could not screenshot, copy or otherwise interact with except to dismiss it. WTF MS? I eventually got it to work, there was nothing wrong with that exe, but I still have no idea what Windows 11's problem was other than it is not fit for purpose.
I have a Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse. it talks to a Lenovo laptop, currently multibooting Win 11 (not for long...) and Ubuntu. When on Win 11, the mouse indicates that it has anywhere from 22 to 31% battery life left, depending on mood. This is, I repeat, a Microsoft product talking to a Microsoft OS.
I keep a spare battery around, just in case.
Yay, Microsoft.
I would not trust Microsoft battery indications. Period.
Yes! The battery icon should literally "add colours"! Battery state is a number, 0-255, with 0 completely-flat and 255 fully-charged.
Take that state, and use it to generate battery icon colours. No more green/yellow/red, but a spectrum, with #000000 being "no charge remaining" (which corresponds with, and cannot be distinguished from, the black of your now-unpowered screen) and #FFFFFF (white) being fully-charged!
It would be highly-valued by geeks for its inscrutability to normies - just as with those clocks which display the time via columns of LEDs which represent binary numbers.
Ah, remember when Windows XP already did that for you? I can't be bothered to delve into the file, but I'd bet batmeter.dll still has those icons available.
Also remember when you got an estimated battery life left? Granted it was always dependent on what you did, but was still a better indicator that the vague partially-shaded battery icon I get today.
https://ripitapart.com/2024/04/20/dispo-adventures-episode-1-reverse-engineering-and-running-windows-95-on-a-disposable-vape-with-a-colour-lcd-screen/winxp-original-battery-icons-4x/
> Also remember when you got an estimated battery life left?
Why "remember", that stuff has been in the OS since Windows 2000 and never went away. You always get a battery estimate. Even as powershell object, given in minutes. Of course the estimate changes depending on what you do.
Maybe it's a config setting on my corporate laptop, but my battery icon in the bottom right shows a rough level in the icon, and hovering over it gives me percentage only. Previous windows versions gave me an estimated time too - I could even configure it to show estimated time persistently. I also don't get an estimate of how long it will take to charge when plugged in anymore.
My point is that this fantastic battery update they're trying (but failing) to roll out for Windows 11 was standard 25 years ago, and they're reinventing the wheel. Check the link I posted, that's what the icons used to look like, and they worked fine. Current Win11 is awful, and that's what they're trying to improve on - by bringing it back to the old Win2K/XP icon differentiation.
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