Not everything is meant to last and so are laptop batteries. Laptop batteries are prone to degradation over time. This causes them to lose some of their total capacity, thus truly, they can’t be charged to their maximum capacity ever again. If you are worried about your battery, then you might want to know its current estimated battery life.

To be honest, it is really easy to do this. Going over at the battery icon and clicking on it does provide you a remaining battery time estimate, but it doesn’t tell you the whole story. That estimate depends upon the kind of work you are doing: Switching from a simple task like browsing to a processor heavy task like gaming can drastically decrease that time. Therefore, the question which arises is about the actual battery life of a laptop.

Knowing this actual battery life tells you about the charge and discharge rates of your battery thus providing you with complete information about your remaining battery lifespan. It does involve using Windows Command Prompt, but in its essence, all it requires is just a couple of commands which are mentioned in this article.

Generating a Battery Report

Note: This method works on Windows 7 as well as earlier and newer version of Windows. With the Windows Power-Shell Replacing the Command Prompt in Windows 10, the only thing different is opening Windows Power-Shell using the same method as you would open Command Prompt

• 1.       First of all, you need to open Command Prompt but with Admin Privileges. Therefore, the shortest way to do that is just by Right-Clicking on the Start button at the bottom-left corner.

• 2.       From the pop-up menu, click on Command Prompt (Admin). This is important since the command won’t work using ordinary Windows Command Prompt.

• 3.       Since this is an admin version of Command Prompt, you would be required to Click on Yes, when a pop-up window asks for your permission.
• 4.       Let’s get to the main part now. In the command prompt window, just type or copy-paste this command: powercfg /batteryreport /output “C:\battery_report.html”. If you really know to use Command Prompt you can designate the battery report to be anywhere on your disk. For pure simplicity, we choose the C drive where the battery report will be generated.

• 5.       Navigate to the location where the battery report was generated (C drive in our case), and just Double-Click on a file named battery_report.html. Choose your favorite browser if it gives you the Open With option.

Note: This command won’t work in case you have a desktop since there aren’t any installed batteries.

Battery Report Explained

There are different sub-sections in the report. The first section just gives the hardware and software overview and won’t matter much.

The next section labeled Installed Batteries is the one important here. There you will see the name, manufacturer, of your battery, Chemistry, Design Capacity and Full Charge Capacity here. From here you can see how much your battery has degraded over time. This is because if your Design Capacity is not equal to the Full Charge Capacity this means your battery cannot charge to its full potential i.e. 100 percent.

Recent Usage is equally important for some users as well since it explains in detail time, state (active, suspended), power source and the remaining capacity of the battery. To explain to the non-tech-savvy it shows when your laptop was used on battery power or plugged in, or went to sleep. Alongside it also shows the percentage of battery remaining its remaining charge as well at each time.

There are sections labeled Usage history and Battery capacity history too, which can easily depict battery life using graphs.

Perhaps if you wanted to know accurate battery-life estimates then just scroll over to the last section labeled Battery life estimates. You can easily get to know the estimated battery life for a specific period, and most importantly, your operating system gives you a very accurate average of your estimated total battery life since your installed operating system on that.

It should be noted that more the time since you installed your Operating System and more the time you spent without plugged in, the more accurate the results. This is because your operating system has a chance to gather more data about your battery when its used more and more, and thus accurate results.

Now you know on how to generate a complete battery report, and we recommend you on using this method once in a month at least, to make sure if everything is all right with your laptop’s battery, especially when it is still covered in warranty.