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 1. How-to
 2. Windows


HOW TO CHECK LAPTOP BATTERY HEALTH IN WINDOWS 10

By Alex Wawro
last updated December 08, 2022

Here's how to check laptop battery health in Windows 10 using a secret tool

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Comments (0)

(Image credit: Future)


It's useful to know how to check laptop battery health in Windows 10. Battery
life is one of the key metrics we look at when recommending laptops, and for
good reason: a laptop isn't much good if it can't last long enough to meet the
demands of your daily life.



That's why we generally believe the best laptops are the ones that can last at
least 10+ hours on a single charge. But laptop batteries are complex wonders,
and the amount of juice they can give you is influenced by a variety of factors:
age, temperature, power demands, and much more. 



That's why it's important to know not just how long your battery can last before
it needs a recharge, but how healthy it is — an old, ailing battery won't last
as long as it did when it was new, and in some cases it can get so worn out that
it makes sense to replace it. 




Windows laptops have a useful but unheralded feature that can help you diagnose
the health of your battery. It's called the Battery Report tool, and in this
article we're going to show you how to use it to get the most out of your
laptop.

RECOMMENDED VIDEOS FOR YOU... Tom's Guide




HOW TO CHECK LAPTOP BATTERY HEALTH: RUN BATTERY REPORT

The Battery Report tool is hidden just below the surface of Windows 10, but it's
easy to use once you know where to look. The trick is to use the Windows command
prompt — here's how:



1. Open the Start menu by clicking it (or by pressing the Windows key on your
keyboard) and launch the Command Prompt. 

The easiest way to do that is to just start typing "Command Prompt" into the
search box — it should appear near the top of your search results pretty
quickly. 

If that doesn't work, you can manually scroll down the Start Menu's app list and
find Command Prompt under the Windows System section. Click the Command Prompt
app to launch it.



(Image credit: Future)

2. Once you have the Command Prompt open you should see a black window with
white text spelling out a command line — likely starting with C: and ending with
your Windows user name. 

Now it's time to get to work: type powercfg /batteryreport (make sure there's a
space between the two terms) and press Enter.

3. Assuming everything went smoothly, you should see a message in the Command
Prompt informing you that a battery report has been saved to your user folder.
Great work!



(Image credit: Future)

4. Now you need to find that report and read it. The fastest way is to open File
Explorer (if you can't find it, type "File Explorer" in the Start Menu search
box) and navigate to the folder where the Command Prompt told you your battery
report was saved.

By default this is your user folder (C:\Users\[yourusernamehere]\), but if you
can't find the battery report there you can also try searching for it on your
hard drive. Just open the Start Menu again and type battery report to start a
search.

If it doesn't show up right away, wait a few minutes (Windows sometimes takes
time to register new files and index them for search purposes) then try your
search again.



(Image credit: Future)

5. Open the battery report and have a look! It will be saved as an HTML file, so
Windows should automatically open it using a web browser. 

The report should look like a long list of information, including battery life
estimates and battery usage reports.  



(Image credit: Future)

Once you have a copy of your Windows laptop's battery report, you should have
all the information you need to diagnose the battery health of your laptop. 


HOW TO CHECK LAPTOP BATTERY HEALTH: WHAT TO LOOK FOR

The quickest way to get a handle on how long your laptop's battery can last is
to skip down to the Battery life estimates section of your newly-created battery
report. There, you'll see estimates of how long your battery should last, based
on how you've been using it in the past. 

Keep in mind that these are imperfect auto-generated estimates, so you're likely
to see some strange math or confusing figures as you scroll down the list,
especially if you've used the laptop erratically recently or have left it unused
for long periods of time.

The most important things to pay attention to are the numbers under the Active
heading: these are estimates of how long your battery would have lasted based on
your laptop usage, formatted as hours, minutes, seconds. 

Also, note that there are two columns of Active battery life estimates: At Full
Charge and At Design Capacity. These are important because they estimate the
difference between your laptop's battery capacity now and when it was
brand-new. 

At Full Charge active time is an estimate of how long your laptop's battery can
last based on its current capacity, whereas At Design Capacity is an estimate of
how long your laptop's battery could have lasted when it was fresh from the
factory.



(Image credit: Future)

You can also get some useful insights from the Battery capacity history section
of the battery report. You can find it midway through the report, and it
provides a dated list of Full charge capacity measured against Design capacity.

Full charge capacity is a measurement of how much power the battery actually
holds, and Design capacity is how much power it was designed to hold. Thus, over
time you should see Full charge capacity diminish compared to Design capacity as
your laptop's battery ages and loses the ability to hold a charge. Once your
laptop's full charge capacity reliably drops 25%-50% below its design capacity,
it's probably time to start thinking about a replacement.



(Image credit: Future)


HOW TO CHECK LAPTOP BATTERY HEALTH: TEST THE BATTERY YOURSELF

If the Battery life estimates section isn't giving you a satisfying picture of
how healthy your laptop's battery is, you can test the battery yourself and use
Battery Report to measure the results. Here's how:

1. Generate a Battery Report (as outlined above) and look at the Battery usage
section: see how it shows you a chart of how the battery was used over the past
few days? 

You can use this to measure exactly how long your battery can last on a full
charge, but you'll have to charge it up to full and then drain it straight down
to zero without letting it hibernate or go to sleep.



(Image credit: Future)

2. First, shut off as many of your laptop's automated power-conservation
features as you can find. Most notably, disable the sleep and hibernation
features, which you should be able to find in the Power & sleep section of your
System settings. The quickest way to find this is to type "Power" in the Start
Menu.



(Image credit: Future)

3. Now come up with a plan of how you're going to use the laptop continuously
until it shuts off. Ideally you should just use it as you normally would all
day, until the battery runs out, but this might not be practical — especially if
your laptop still lasts 8+ hours on a single charge. Alternatively, you could
mute the laptop and set it to play a 24-hour-long YouTube video, or launch into
a game and leave it running all day. 

4. Now charge your laptop up to full power and disconnect it from the charger,
start your test of choice, and let the laptop run until it shuts off
automatically. Once it's off, connect it to power again, let it charge up until
you can turn it back on, then generate another battery report using the process
outlined above. You should see a new entry in the Battery usage section which
reveals how long the laptop lasted (under whatever workload you gave it) on a
full charge. 

Performing these steps provides a good way to get an up-to-date idea of how long
your laptop can last on a full charge. 

You can run this test every few months to keep tabs on your laptop battery's
health, or try it with different workloads (a full day of web browsing and
emailing vs. a full day of watching movies or playing games, for example) to get
a better sense of which activities drain your laptop's battery the fastest.

Next: These are our top 5 tips to help your old laptop last longer.

 * More: How to use a laptop as a monitor
 * How to turn off automatic updates in Windows 10
 * How to disable the Windows key in Windows 10
 * How to check your PC's CPU temperature
 * How to enable God Mode in Windows 10 and 11
 * How to use System Restore in Windows 10

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Alex Wawro
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Alex Wawro is a lifelong tech and games enthusiast with more than a decade of
experience covering both for outlets like Game Developer, Black Hat, and PC
World magazine. A lifelong PC builder, he currently serves as a senior editor at
Tom's Guide covering all things computing, from laptops and desktops to
keyboards and mice. 




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