How To Check Laptop Battery Health & Determine its Level of Depreciation

How To Check Laptop Battery Health & Determine its Level of Depreciation

Knowing how to check the health of your laptop’s battery can help you avoid wasting your hard-earned cash on battery salespeople and repair technicians. But battery care knowledge aside, the ability to monitor the health of a laptop’s battery can go a long way in preserving its lifespan and improving its efficiency.

There are many third-party applications on the market that claim to help monitor laptop batteries, but in reality they don’t work like the operating system’s built-in commands.

For this reason, it is recommended to use the right resources for the right jobs and put third-party battery monitoring applications on hiatus for now.Yes! Leave them alone and pass the job to your computer’s built-in command prompt.

How Do I Check Laptop Battery Health?

The steps I’m going to walk you through generate what’s called a Laptop Battery Health Report. This will help you understand how the battery works and the level of battery drain.

Steps to check laptop battery status
Right-click the Start button on your Windows desktop and select Command Prompt from the list of available options. Do not select Command Prompt with N.B= admin.
When Command Prompt starts, enter the following code in the writable area.
powercfg /battery report

Press Enter to run the code.
This code creates a web page in the root directory. To get to that location, do The Following

Open My Computer
Click on Local Disk (C:)
Click on a folder named Users
Click on your username. In my case, Tunisbaba is my username
After clicking that, a webpage named battery-report should be staring at you and what you want to do now is to click on it.
Clicking on it would open the file in your browser and a full report on your battery health condition would show up.

Explanation of Battery Health Report
The first thing you would get from the report is COMPUTER NAME which is given by you, as well as the full PRODUCT NAME which is given by the manufacturer.

Scroll down to Installed Battery; this is where you will know the condition of your battery.

NAME: This gives the name of the battery

MANUFACTURER: This tells the name of the battery manufacturer

SERIES NUMBER: This is product or batch number

CHEMISTRY: This means the kind of technology or element used in making the battery. Most Batteries are Lithium Ion (Li-I) Technology.

DESIGN CAPACITY: This is one of the most important information you want to know about your battery. Design Capacity means the total amount of energy the battery can store as design by the manufacturer.

FULL CHARGE CAPACITY: This shows the maximum capacity of energy the battery can hold at the current level of usage when fully charged to 100%.

CYCLE COUNT: This refers to the number of times your battery has completed a cycle in term of being full charged to 100%, then discharge to a critical percentage below 10% and then charge again to 100%.

Knowing the Level of Health of Laptop Battery

By calculating the difference between design capacity and full charge capacity, you would know the level of depreciation your battery has gone through and you can then make some informed decision by follow the tips we gave on how to care for your battery.

In the case of my battery, the design capacity is 48,600 mWh while the full charge capacity is 26,492 mWh; this means my battery has lost 22108 mWh to wear as a result of usage.

From this health report, I can conclude that my battery health is fair cos I have lost almost half of its storage capacity and I need to start saving for a replacement.

If the difference between the two capacities in your battery is very close or the same, then you should be happy. It means your battery health is good and you have nothing to worry about.

However, if the full charge capacity is much lower than the design capacity, the battery is in poor condition, so be careful.

To track the battery health depreciation log, scroll down the battery report page until you see the following sections: This section shows the battery daily depreciation report.

You should use the information in this report to check the health of your laptop’s battery. We recommend running this reporting command once a month to better understand and optimize battery performance.

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