Lithium-ion batteries have been immensely useful in creating ultraportable devices. However, these batteries need to be replaced after a limited number of charge cycles. But how do you know if your laptop battery needs replacing? For this reason, Windows allows you to generate a battery report that can be used to determine the health of your laptop’s battery to allow you to decide if you need to replace the battery.
While the battery report sounds useful, creating one is more complicated than navigating to the Battery section of the Windows 11 Settings app. That’s why we put together this guide. to simplify the process for you step by step, followed by an explanation of how you can easily analyze the battery report you just generated.
How to generate a battery report on Windows 11
Instead of using the usual Settings app or Control Panel, you’ll need to execute a simple command in the Command Prompt to generate a battery report on your Windows 11 laptop. Here are the steps for the same:
Step 1: Press Windows + S key combination and type Command prompt. Then from the results for Command Prompt, click ‘Run as administrator.’
Step 2: Click Yes when the User Account Control (UAC) prompt appears on the screen.
Step 3: Type the following command in the Command Prompt window and press Enter to generate the battery report.
powercfg/batteryreport/output “C:\battery-report.html”
The powercfg /batteryreport section of the command generates a battery report. The /output “C:\battery-report.html” section specifies the filename and location of the battery report to be saved to a specific location on your computer.
You can change the path and filename to your liking by replacing C: with any other drive letter and battery-report.html with something else.
Alternatively, you can use the same command to generate a battery report using Windows PowerShell.
How to access and read battery reports
After generating a battery report, you may want to access and analyze it to determine the capacity and health of your laptop’s battery. Here’s how you can access your Windows laptop, with an explanation of how you can read it.
Step 1: Press the Win + E key combination on the keyboard to open File Explorer.
Step 2: When This PC File Explorer window appears on your screen, navigate to the location where you saved the battery report.
If you didn’t change the file location in the command mentioned earlier, you can find the battery report by clicking on This PC, then clicking on your PC’s C: drive.
Step 3: Find the battery-report.html file and double-click to open it in Microsoft Edge.
Or, if you want to open the battery report in another web browser, right-click the battery-report.html file. Then from the context menu that appears, click Open with and select the web browser of your choice (in this case, Google Chrome).
After following the steps outlined above, you should see a battery report open in your web browser, as shown in the screenshot below:
The initial steps involved in generating and accessing a battery report may seem easy, but reading a report with six overwhelming pieces of information is quite another. Read along as we explain the usage and function of each section of the battery report, making things a little easier to understand.
- Installed battery: This section of the report provides a detailed look at the battery specifications on your laptop. You can use this to find a battery’s manufacturer, capacity, full charge capacity, and the number of times a battery has been charged and discharged over its life, expressed as Charge Cycles.
- Recent Use: This section of the report shows when the computer was actively used, idle/hanging, or connected to the charger for three days.
- Battery Usage: This section provides a graphical and tabular representation of battery drain over the past three days.
- Usage History: This section provides a tabular representation of when the battery runs on battery power and when the battery is connected to the charger during its lifetime.
- Battery capacity history: This section is responsible for showing the change in the charge capacity of the battery over the entire period of use.
- Battery Life Estimate: This section of the report gives a calculated estimate of the overall standby time of the battery depending on the current charge capacity compared to when your laptop battery was relatively new.
The Battery Report gives you details like how many hours your laptop has been charged, the screen turns on on time on a charge, the model number and type of your battery to find a compatible replacement battery, etc
Know it’s time to replace your laptop battery
In addition to the information listed previously, the battery report also provides information about your laptop’s Design Capacity and Full Charge Capacity (listed under Installed Batteries). You can use both details to estimate if you need to replace your laptop battery, as detailed in the next paragraph.
To determine if your laptop battery needs replacing, subtract the Full Charge Capacity from the Design Capacity. If the deducted capacity is less than half of the Design Capacity, you will need to replace your laptop battery. If the battery capacity is lower, it means that your laptop battery cannot hold the same amount of power as it did when it was new. So you’ll need to charge your laptop more often to maintain the same screen life.
In our case, 48,944 mWh – 26,706 mWh = 22,238 mWh, meaning the battery life is less than half of the Design Capacity (48994 mWh ÷ 2 = 24,472 mWh) and needs replacement. Let us know what results you can come up with, in the comments section below.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
