How to Check the Health of Your Laptop’s Battery in Windows

Batteries power our favorite electronic devices, but they’re not meant to last forever. The good news is that Windows laptops have a battery report feature that breaks down whether your battery is still kicking or is on its last legs. All you need to do is enter one simple line of code.

The report will take the form of an HTML file saved onto your drive that will show you battery usage data, capacity history, and life estimates. If the battery needs to be replaced, this report will tell you, long before it has a chance to fail. Here’s how to generate the report and what to look for.

This will open Windows Terminal, a tabbed terminal emulator that can run PowerShell, Command Prompt, and other command-line programs. PowerShell will be open by default, so enter the following code and press Enter:

powercfg /batteryreport /output “C:\battery-report.html”

Once the command is entered, PowerShell will tell you the name of the generated battery life report and where it has been saved on your computer. You can see here that it’s named battery-report.html and is saved to the C drive. You can now close Windows Terminal.

Open File Explorer and click the OS (C:) entry under This PC. The battery report will be saved in this folder as an HTML file. Double-click to open the file in your default web browser.

View the Battery Report

The report will outline the health of your laptop battery, how well it has been doing, and how much longer it might last. At the top of the battery report, you will see basic information about your computer, followed by the battery’s specs.

Under Recent Usage, take note of each time the laptop ran on battery power or was attached to AC power. Every drain over the last three days is tracked in the Battery Usage section. You can also get a full history of the battery’s usage under the Usage History section.

The Battery Capacity History section shows how the capacity has changed over time. On the right is Design Capacity, or how much the battery was designed to handle. On the left is Full Charge Capacity, where you can see the battery’s current capacity on a full charge, which will likely decline over time the more you use your device.

This leads us to the Battery Life Estimates section. On the right, you can see how long it should last based on design capacity; on the left, you see how long it’s actually lasting. A current, final battery-life estimation is at the bottom of the report. In this case, my PC would last 6:02:03 at design capacity, but will currently only hold out for 4:52:44.