Check Your Laptop Battery

Our laptop batteries have the potential to power our laptops for years if we follow some tips described here. One of my laptops still work with its original battery even after 10 years. To know the health of your laptop battery you don't need any extra software or hardware. Your Windows 10 comes baked with an utility.

Step 1: Know Your Laptop Battery

As a regular user of a smart phone for a long time, you know that a battery which powers your device has a finite life and over a period of time it slowly loses its capacity. It is entirely a different matter that your battery doesn't lose its capacity uniformly in a linear fashion always. There are factors such as the operating temperature, the state of charge, the charging current and duration which affect the capacity. These days you get Lithium-ion batteries which have better characteristics than the earlier Ni-cad batteries which had 'memory effect'.

Hook your laptop to the power supply for any kind of sustained activity. Batteries are for regions where you don't have access to the mains power supply. Most applications would throttle the CPU if the supply line falls below a threshold value like they do in your iPhone.
Fortunately Windows 10 ships with a great utility called as powercfg which displays a detailed battery report amongst other things.

Go to the command prompt by pressing Windows key and type cmd on the search bar on the lower left region. And when it says Command Prompt app, right click on that and select 'Run as Administrator' .

You will see a black window. Type: powercfg/batteryreport

Step 2: Laptop Battery Report

As you can see from the picture here, the system will respond with a full battery report.

It will save a nice formatted HTML file usually in your Windows/System32/ directory. Your browser may not be allowed to open that file. So right click on that file and copy it to save it elsewhere. Now you can open that file to view a full history of your battery along with its current status.

What is more it doesn't stop there. You can also see the history of the battery status which is pretty useful to check how your new battery has deteriorated over a period of time. It helps you with actionable information on how to extend your battery life.

My Toshiba laptop battery still works after 10 years. It still shows 80 % life left in it. This instructables is primarily written to share our experience in extending the useful life of our laptops. Actually this information is largely sourced from the Upgrading your Laptop blog.

Step 3: Extend Your Battery Life

The relatively modern Lithium ion has no memory effect which translates to the fact that you don't have to discharge your battery periodically to prolong its life. But Li-ion batteries like any normal mechanical devices wear out faster with heavy use. The depth of discharge actually determines the cycle count of the battery. In other words, don't discharge your battery to the end and don't charge to the full 100 % level. My laptops and my phones are charged when their state of charge falls below 35-40 % and the charge is cut off when they reach the 90 % state of charge level.
Most laptop batteries have around 500 - 700 cycles of life depending upon the manufacturer and the working conditions. Your mileage may vary. Many laptops have a 'Save battery' option which cuts off the charging circuit for the battery when they reach the 80 % charge level. Use this option if you leave the charger permanently connected to the power supply.

Step 4: Power Management

Power supply is critical for proper working of all machines. Laptops are no different. I came across many problems with connectivity issues and software issues when the laptop works on battery.

If some app doesn't run properly or the wifi intermittently stops working you need to delve deep into the power management system. Again this utility comes in handy. Type :
powercfg/ENERGY

and the utility will churn out an energy report which can identify how your Windows is configured to utilize the available power. In one case, the random Wifi issue was traced to a wrong power configuration in which the system reduced the Wifi radio power after some period of inactivity.