Battery Health Status Report in Windows (8,8.1 and 10)

Anyone who routinely uses a laptop knows that the batteries in them don’t last forever. This is an inherent part of the Lithium-ion batteries used in much of today’s tech.

It can therefore be helpful to get a better understanding of the current health of the battery – especially if you’re selling, or have just bought, a laptop.

With Windows 8, Microsoft added a very useful feature which generates a fairly comprehensive report on the health and status of your battery/batteries

Yet, in true Microsoft fashion, they hid the feature and made it accessible only via the command prompt

To run the report

Launch the Command Prompt by Right-Clicking the Start Menu à Command Prompt

In the Command Prompt, enter

powercfg /batteryreport

and [ENTER]

This will create a html file, and save it to your c:\Users\username folder

Reading the Report

Locate the saved html, and open it – it will open in your default Web Browser

One of the first sections simply provides the details of the batteries installed (my laptop has two internal batteries)

But at the bottom you can see our first useful bit of info – Design Capacity v Full Charge Capacity

Helpfully, mine is showing a current capacity higher than the design capacity – but it’s a new laptop, so not entirely surprising

(I recently ran this report for a laptop I was selling, and showed the battery capacity at about 90% of design capacity – which translated well into what I was actually experiencing)

Further down the report, you have detailed information on your usage…

The historic capacity v design capacity data, useful for seeing the degradation of the battery over time

And expected battery life based on trended OS usage