How to get power cable connected/disconnected alerts on Windows 10
Windows 10 has a low battery threshold that you can set after which the system enters sleep. It’s meant to keep you from losing data in the event you exhaust your battery and you have unsaved work. Unfortunately, that’s the extent of battery and power-related alerts that Windows 10 gives you. If you want to get full battery alerts, you’re going to have to use a script or an app for the job. The same is true if you want to get power cable connected/disconnected alerts.
Power connected/disconnected alerts
You can get power connected/disconnected alerts with an AutoHotKey script. There’s one by David Deley that you can use. The script is also available as a packaged EXE that you can use. Download it, and run the script or the EXE. For the script, you must have AutoHotKey installed but the EXE will run as a portable app.
When the power goes out, or you disconnect the power cable to your laptop, you will get both a desktop alert and an audio alert.
When you connect the power cable again, or power comes back on, you will see and hear a similar alert.
Battery Deley also tells you when your battery charge hits certain milestones e.g., 90%, 80%, 70%, etc. You can change this from the app’s setting but the settings aren’t in a GUI format . They’re still in script format so you’ll basically have an AutoHotKey script to edit in Notepad.
If you do not like the audio alerts or the desktop alerts that are shown, you can change those as well by creating new ones, moving them to the folder the app’s EXE or AHK file is in, and updating the path and file names in the file. It might be a bit intimidating if you don’t know your way around an AHK script.
If you are familiar with how AHK scripts are written, you can edit the script enough so that it only gives you alerts when the power is connected or disconnected. You can write out the alerts the app/script gives you when the battery hits certain percentages. You can also customize the battery percentages that the app shows alerts for.
It’s odd that Windows 10 doesn’t offer better battery and power management options. Older versions of Windows were more or less the same even though they ran on systems that did not have as good a battery life. Users can customize the reserve battery percentage but beyond that, there’s nothing else that can be done without an app or script.
