What about the battery status of the laptop. A report can be generated quickly under Windows.
Windows offers a possibility to generate a battery report with the “powercfg” tool via the command line. This report contains a lot of information about the state of the battery. Capacity, remaining capacity, runtimes, charge cycles and consumption are listed in the report.
Create report
To generate the report, we open a command prompt. Here we enter the following command:
powercfg /batteryreport /output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\battery_report.html
Admin privileges are not required, but don’t hurt either. Of course, the command only works on devices with a battery.
The report is then on the desktop.
The report and analysis of battery quality
We can open the report with a browser, just double click. It starts with general information about the computer, for example here from my Thinkpad and my Microsoft Surface.
General battery information
The following is information about the installed batteries. Here we already see the first interesting information. The “Design Capacity” gives the capacity that the new battery had. The “Full Charge Capacity” gives the current capacity. Every battery loses capacity over time, the value gives an insight into how much is left. The lower the value, the less long the battery lasts in everyday use.
The Cycle Count indicates the number of charge cycles.
Last usage of the battery
“Recent usage” displays information from the last 3 days. Date and time when the device was running on battery and when there was a switch to AC power. With information about what capacity and state of charge the battery had at that moment.
Battery consumption for the last 3 days
The following is a graph which shows the battery usage for the last 3 days. In the example here, we can see that on today’s day, within a short time, the battery has been flattened.
In addition to the diagram, a table is also available. Here we can see the values of the diagram. In my example, I drained the battery by 74%, within 2 hours. Unfortunately, the Surface doesn’t last that long with more CPU usage.
Development of the battery capacity in the past
The next table gives the battery history over the period since use. Here we can see in which state the computer was in which period of time. So we can see how long the computer was active, how long in battery mode or how long in standby mode.
Battery capacity development
The next table is again a bit more interesting, here you can track the capacity of the battery over time. Starting from the first use, to the current date. Here we can see how the capacity decreases over time.
Estimation of battery life
An estimate of the battery life follows at the end of the report. The table shows the values that the device determined at certain times. The values may be quite different depending on what one just did with the computer. He only writes some Word, gets higher values than someone who tortures the computer with video rendering while on battery.
Finally, there is an estimate for the average expected battery life. In my case, the Surface assumes 7:38 hours, although we can see above that it can also be the end of the day after a good 2 hours depending on use.
Conclusion
The battery report outputs a lot of interesting information about the battery, the capacity and the expected runtime. The information is especially interesting for used devices, but it’s also interesting to see whether you can think about a battery exchange for your own laptop, if possible.
