Saturday, September 02, 2006

Missing/Disappearing Battery/Power Icon/Meter in Windows XP SP2 on Acer, IBM Thinkpad, Toshiba, etc Laptops!

You got a brand new laptop with Windows XP SP2 & applied those Windows Update??
A few days later you get this annoying loss of POWER METER/BATTERY ICON from the system tray!

I did a few research & four possible solutions found are listed here...

Solution 1:
1. Right-click on My Computer, Click on Manage
2. Expand 'Services & Applications'
3. Highlight 'Services'
4. Look through list of services on the right....
5. Find Universal Plug & Play Device Host
6. Right-click on it.
7. Click properties.
8. Change startup type to 'Disabled'
9. Do exactly the same with 'SSDP discovery service'

Restart & you would get your Icon BACK!

Solution 2:
1. Open Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs.
2. In the sidebar, click on Add/Remove Windows Components.
3. Scroll down to Networking Services, select it, and click the Details... button.
4. Uncheck UPnP User Interface & other UPnP Service Listed.
5. OK your way out, close Add/Remove Programs, and reboot.
All tray icons should appear normally, without the need to log off and back on.

Solution 3:
1. START, RUN, type "regedit", then enter
2. Once in the Registry Editor, navigate the left directory tree to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
3. Then right click on the right window pane, click new, then string value.
4. Give the new string value the name "systray"
5. Your new value should now have the name "systray", the type "REG_SZ", and no/empty data.
6. Right click on your new "systray" value and click "modify".
7. Now give "systray" the value data: "C:\WINDOWS\system32\systray.exe"
8. Click ok and close the Registry Editor.
9. Restart your computer.

Solution 4:
1. Save the following "systray.zip" file & unzip it to extract "systray.reg"
Download(Save Target As): http://www.filefactory.com/file/a1b9773/n/systray_zip
2. Double click the file to add the contents to registry!
3. Then restart the PC & it would be solved...
Source: Digiportal Software

Above is also the general solution for any other System Tray Icons Failing/Disappearing from Loading...
Apart from this, no other concrete solution has been yet discovered by me...

Another part you must be worried regarding the services disable & unistallation of UPnP stuff! Well..as of now UPnP is not much used, so you can safely do the steps as i said...until microsoft provides an solution in future releases!

If you have another uncommon problem like Windows XP/2K/2K3 Server showing wrong battery time, then you need to get a hotfix from Microsoft...
Read: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889816

Please post the solution which worked for you as an comment to this post & also stat wat exactly was your problem, so others can be benefited from it!

Sources:
Google & Annoyances.org
Notes: This article has been tested on my Acer Aspire 3002NLC Laptop & also found to be working on other company models like IBM Thinkpad, Lenovo, Toshiba, Sony Vaio, etc..

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perfect, the 1st solution gave me back my battery icon.

cheers

Anonymous said...

Yay, first solution worked for me, too. Kudos.