How to run a battery life report on your Windows laptop

When my editor told me about Windows’ built-in battery report, my first thought was, “How come I never heard of this? It also sounds pretty useful! Then I looked at the guide he had sent (from Laptop Magazine) and try it out. In the end, it was just as interesting as it sounded, and I thought I would share it, if you had not come across this handy built-in tool either.

Windows has been monitoring the installation of your laptop battery. The report, which you can complete with just two command prompt commands, shows how many cycles you have used on your battery and how it has been used in the last three days. It also gives you an idea of ​​what Windows estimates your battery life must be against what it actually is.

So if you’re curious about your battery status or have noticed that your battery life has been a bit sluggish lately, and you’re wondering if it’s due to neglect or a power virus on your computer that sucks up a lot of juice, this report should let you know.

• 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 spit out as an HTML file, so we want to make sure it’s easy to find. To do this, tap:

cd% HOMEPATH% / Desktop

• This command simply navigates your current directory to your desktop, so if you generate the report, you can find it there.
• To generate the report, type:

powercfg / battery report

• It runs the powerconfig tool and says it should spit out a battery report, which should now sit as an HTML file on your desktop.
• Double-click on the file to open it in your browser (or you can ask in which program you want to open the file, which is your browser). Now you can see all the sweet, sweet battery information.

One caveat: my laptop is in use, and as a policy, I’ll highlight the Windows installation on every laptop I buy, and replace it with a new one. If you have just purchased a used laptop and want to know the condition of the battery, you will probably want to use this tool previously to wipe Windows, as the cycle seems to only reflect what happened during the current Windows installation. My laptop is a 2018 model and I’m pretty sure it’s been through more than 177 cycles since then.

Even if you have a newer installation, you can get a general sense of health by looking at the design capacity and then looking at the full load capacity to see how different it is.

If you’re an Apple user who’s out of charge, do not worry: MacOS also gives you access to some battery information, although there is not much historical data. To see it, go to the Apple menu at the top left and click on “About This Mac.” Then click the System Report button and go to Power under Hardware. There you can see the cycle count of your battery, its estimated health and all your current power settings. To see your battery usage graphs during the last 24 hours or 10 days, go to System Preferences and then Battery.