How to check the battery status and history in Windows
Learn how to dig up a lot of data on your battery with a handy command built into Windows.
Image: iStockphoto / VikiVector
Windows offers you a quick overview of your battery status in the taskbar, so you can see what percentage and how much time is left on your current charge. But you can also find more information about your battery charge and battery history. With the powercfg command-line program you can generate a report with the battery name, manufacturer, serial number, chemistry, number of cycles and usage history. Let’s see how we can generate a battery report in Windows.
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First, you can easily check the current charge of your battery. Click on the battery icon on the taskbar and a message should show you the percentage of available charge remaining, as well as the number of hours and minutes until the charge runs out. In many cases you can also adjust the Power Mode settings here to find a balance between the best performance and the best battery life (Figure A).
Figure A
From there you can further view and adjust your battery options by clicking on the link for Battery settings. In the Settings window you can adjust certain functions that affect the life of the battery, such as the brightness of the screen. You can also enable the Battery Saving option, which reduces the brightness of the screen and changes other factors to try to maintain the battery charge if it falls below a certain point (Figure B).
Figure B
Suppose you want to know more about your battery charge, capacity and history. This information can be useful when your laptop gets older and the battery doesn’t have as much pep as before. It can also help if you need to replace the battery and make sure you get the same type.
You can generate a battery report with a range of details. To do this, open a command prompt and type powercfg / batteryreport. Use this command to create a battery report in the form of an HTML file. The file is stored in every folder or folder that the command prompt refers to. So you may want to use the CD command to go to a specific folder, such as your user subfolder under Users, e.g. cd users (your username) (Figure C).
Figure C
Open Explorer or Windows Explorer and double-click the battery-report.html file to open it in your default browser. The top of the battery report contains basic information such as your computer name, product name, BIOS version and date, and OS build.
As you browse the report, you will find details about your battery, including the number of batteries installed with their manufacturer, the serial number, the design capacity, and the full charge capacity. By comparing the design capacity with the full charge capacity, you can see how much your battery may have deteriorated in terms of maintaining the highest capacity for which it was designed (Figure D).
Figure D
Scroll further down to find a section on Recent use, which displays data from the last three days in both the active and interrupted mode of your battery. Active mode describes the laptop that is in use, while Suspended mode refers to the laptop during sleep mode or sleep mode. This section also shows you when the laptop was running on battery power versus connected to AC power. You can see the dates and time, as well as the remaining capacity for each measurement (Figure E).
Figure E
The following section shows the battery usage and drains the last three days with data on the amount of charge discharged and the duration (Figure F).
Figure F
Next, the Usage History section goes back in time to reveal usage on both AC and battery. The Battery capacity history section also goes further back to show you the full charge capacity compared to the design capacity for specific dates (Figure G).
Figure G
Finally, the last section for battery life estimates attempts to predict the remaining number of hours of your battery life based on the number and level of depletion so far (Figure H).
Figure H
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