Determining laptop battery health and capacity in Windows 8, 8.1 and 10

Hello everyone, today i will teach you to determine your laptop battery pack's capacity using inbuilt windows tool, "powercfg". This tool lets you determine capacity of battery pack plus have in-depth insight on previous battery usages.


Pre-requisites:

Windows command prompt operating knowledge

Windows 8, 8.1 or 10 version

Steps:

1.  Run command prompt in elevated mode
   

   

   1.1 Run command prompt in elevated mode

   

   1.2 Verify whether command prompt is in elevated mode or not

2. Change working directory to desktop or drive or path where you find easy (Here I am using “Reports” folder in “K:” drive)
    k: ↵  
    cd reports ↵ 

   

   2 Change working directory

3. Enter into command prompt following command to generate report on current directory
    powercfg /batteryreport ↵ 

   

   3 Generate powercfg battery report

4. Open “battery-report.html” file which contains detailed report about your laptop battery which was recently generated on path you mentioned above [K:\Reports in my case]
   

   

   4 Verify generated report html file

5. Understanding generated battery report file
   

   

   5 Understanding generated battery report file

   Design Capacity is: factory made original capacity
   Full Charge Capacity is: actual capacity battery is capable of holding
   
   The difference in above value signifies that:
   
   If Full Charge Capacity is greater than Design Capacity, battery is working well than factory anticipated.
   Otherwise, battery has degraded over time amounting to difference in Design Capacity and Full Charge Capacity.

Further Learnings:

We can utilize powercfg tool to configure power schemes and also generate energy usage reports to determine what is draining laptop battery. To expand knowledge on powercfg refer to urls in References.

References:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824902.aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn481227(v=vs.85).aspx

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This article/tutorial is written by Arun Poudel, ICTV Pokhara Sub-Metropolitan City Office. For feedback and any queries, please comment on the article below.

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About Author (Arun Poudel)

This portal "ICT for Local Bodies" is written by various individuals - ICT Experts and ICT Volunteers working under MoFALD/LGCDP with an aim of integrating ICT at Local Governance. The author is this post is mentioned at the end of the article itself (with their Google+ profile alongside). Learn more about ICT4LB KMDB here.