How to Run a Battery Life Report on Your Windows Laptop

When my editor told me about Window’s built-in battery report, my first thought was, “How have I never heard of this before? In addition, this looks very useful! “So I looked at the guide he sent (from Laptop Magazine) and tried it out. It turned out to be as interesting as it looked, so I decided to share it, in case you also didn’t find this internal tool useful.

Windows has been monitoring your laptop’s battery performance since it was installed. The report, which you can run using just two command prompt commands, will show how many cycles you have used on your battery and how it has been used in the past three days. It will also give you an image of how Windows estimates battery life he must be versus what it really is.

So, if you are curious about the battery status or have noticed that battery life has been a little tiring lately and are wondering if it is due to negligence or some power virus on your computer is sucking a lot of juice, report should inform you.

• First, open the Command Prompt tool. To do this, you can search for “CMD” in the Start menu and click on Command Prompt to open it.
• The report will be generated as an HTML file, so we want to make sure it’s easy to find. To do this, type:

cd% HOMEPATH% / Desktop

• This command simply navigates from the current directory to the workspace, so that when you generate the report, you can find it there.
• To generate the report, type:

powercfg / batteryreport

• This runs the powerconfig tool and tells it to spit out a battery report, which should now be on your desktop as an HTML file.
• Double-click the file to open it in your browser (or you may be asked which program you want to open the file in, what your browser would be). Now you can see all this beautiful information about the battery.

One caveat: my laptop is used and, as a policy, I completely damage any Windows installation on any laptop I bought, replacing it with a new one. If you just bought a used laptop and you want to know what battery the battery is in, you probably want to run this tool before cleaning Windows, as it appears that the cycle count reflects only what happened in the current Windows installation. My laptop is a 2018 model and I’m pretty sure it has gone through more than 177 cycles since then.

Even if you are in a more recent installation, you can get a general sense of integrity by looking at the design capacity and then the total load capacity to see how they are different.

If you’re an Apple user who’s feeling left out, don’t worry: macOS also allows you to access some information about the battery, although there’s not that much historical data. To see it, go to the Apple menu in the upper left corner and click on “About this Mac”. Then click on the System Report button and, under Hardware, go to Power. There, you can see your battery’s cycle count, your estimated health, and all current power settings. To view battery usage graphs for the past 24 hours or 10 days, go to System and Battery Preferences.