The battery icon on my Taskbar has vanished! I don’t know how to tell how much charge I have left now on my Win10 system. How can I bring the battery [power] icon back?
There’s a lot of flexibility with what appears in the taskbar, and unfortunately it’s not all controlled by a single place, so you have to poke around a bit to get it customized to your preferences. On the bright side, it is highly customizable, so that’s a positive, right? 🙂
What you’re asking about Microsoft actually calls the ‘power’ icon, not the battery icon, though if you’re running on battery power it shows a battery image that’s filled in based on the percentage of power you have remaining in your device. Being able to assess remaining energy is pretty critical if you’re running on battery power too, so I understand your desire to restore it.
Not to worry, we can do that!
To start, here’s the lower right area of the taskbar without the power icon:
See the up arrow (“^” character)? That actually reveals a menu with some icons that aren’t on the main display, and if you hover your cursor over the power icon, well, you can see what happens:
That gives you a quick way to check, even if it’s not an immediate visual indication as you would get on the taskbar itself. Click on the power icon and you get even more information:
Quite useful, and the ability to move your configuration along a continuum between best battery life and best performance is quite handy!
But let’s fix this missing icon problem. To do that, right click on the taskbar itself. A menu pops up:
Choose “Taskbar settings“, the very bottom option of all the choices shown.
A new window pops up:
You’ll need to scroll down just a bit to get to the “Notification area”, as shown above, but find that, then click on the link “Select which icons appear on the taskbar“. Now, another window:
The one you seek is at the bottom: Power. Click on the on/off button to ensure it’s on and it’ll show up on the taskbar itself again:
And that’s how you solve the problem. While you’re there, have a look at the other icon choices and customize it to just show those you pay attention to!