#1. Introduction:
Laptop batteries and batteries in general are not designed to last forever. A battery can serve you for a long time if you manage it well.
Checking your laptop's battery health should be something you do often if you really care about getting a lot of juice out of it. You don't need sophisticated instruments to know your laptop battery's health. It's very easy and you'll learn how to do it.
Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. How to Generate Battery Report on Windows 7
3. How to Generate Battery Report on Windows 8 & 10
4. Battery Design Capacity and Full Charge Capacity
5. Meaning of mAh and mWh
6. Basic calculation to determine how long your battery will last
7. Charge Cycles
8. Things that decline battery life
9. How to get genuine battery replacement
10. Common myths about laptop battery
As a side note, you have to know that a battery's health declines over time due to their chemical makeup. Just like your car tyres wear out, laptop batteries also wear out with time. The chemistry of modern batteries is Lithium Ion and they need care if they will serve you well and long.
I will discuss how you can check battery health on Windows 7, 8 & 10 PC by generating Battery Report without using a 3rd-party application.
You can read: Is Pirated Windows Software Safe?
#2. How To Generate Battery Report on Windows 7
1. Press Windows key on your laptop.
2. Type in cmd.
3. Right click and click Run as administrator
4. Accept Users Account Control by clicking Yes. An elevated Command Prompt will come up.
5. Type in the command powercfg -energy and wait for about 1 minute for energy report to be generated.
6. A path with html file will be written below the command you have typed and you'll find the path on your Hard Drive.
7. You can either copy the path, usually starting with C:, and paste in the path box in Windows Explorer and press Enter key, type the path into the directory box or manually search for the file following the path directory in Windows Explorer and then double click.
8. Your browser will open with the generated energy report. It is self explanatory. Read through the errors, warnings and information and make adjustments where necessary.
#3. How To Generate Battery Report on Windows 8 &10
1. Press Windows key on your laptop.
2. Type in cmd.
3. Right click cmd and click Run as administrator. You can as well see 'Run as administrator' at the right side on Windows 10.
4. Accept User Account Control by clicking Yes. An elevated Command Prompt will come up.
5. There are two commands you can use on Windows 10.
¶ Type in the command powercfg /energy and wait for about 1 minute for energy report to be generated.
This first command is preferable if you want to know more about some of your PC's processes affecting battery life other than energy report alone. In the report generated by this command, you will be able to know which processes are consuming your battery and it will point out necessary adjustments for you to make. It will also tell you which process is using up high CPU power, which consequently affects battery life.
You can read: Computer Storage Optimization
¶ For the other method, type in the command powercfg /batteryreport. This second command is preferable if you want to monitor charge history, charge cycle, active times on AC power, active battery times and also the serial number of your battery in case you need to order for a new genuine replacement. When you scroll down, there's a graph for your to monitor charging and discharging for the past three days.
6. A path with html file will be pop up and you'll find it in the path on your Hard Drive.
7. You can either copy the path, usually starting with C:, and paste it into the directory box in Windows Explorer and press Enter key, type the path in or manually search for the file following the path directory in Windows Explorer and then double click.
8. Your browser will open with the generated battery report.
In the generated battery report, you will see the design capacity of your PC's battery when you scroll down the page. You will also see full charge capacity and charge cycles.
If full charge capacity is less than design capacity, then you should be planning to get another one soon.
#4. Design Capacity and Full Charge Capacity
• Design Capacity of your laptop's battery is the maximum amount of charge it is calibrated to store.
Mind you, the manufacturer's calibration is not the exact capacity of the battery. Not all batteries are the same. Two batteries with the same chemistry, made the same day and from the same manufacturer can never be the same.
• Full Charge Capacity is simply the amount of charge your battery can store when it charges up to 100%. It decreases overtime unlike design capacity that remains the same.
• In the last picture above, the full charge capacity of the laptop I used was 46188mWh while the design capacity was 50012mWh.
If we are to calculate the maximum percentage it can store it will be (46188/50012) x 100 = 92%. Which means the battery has degraded by 8%. That doesn't mean the battery will not reach 100% when it is fully charged. It will display 100% when it is fully charged but the overall life span will be off by 8%. That's why some batteries will not last even if they have the opportunity to charge up to 500%.
• If full charge capacity is close to design capacity or if full charge capacity is not below 50% of the design capacity, then your PC's battery can last a long time or a fairly long time, provided you still mange it well.
#5 • What is mWh and mAh?
• They are simply units of electrical energy and electrical charge respectively. With basic calculations, they signify how long your battery can last when it draws any amount of current that is carried around by a terminal voltage.
The full meaning of mWh is milliWatt hour while for mAh is milliAmpere hour.
I don't want to bore you with electricity physics but the purpose of this site is to educate. If you're interested, keep on reading, else skip.
The commonest unit is mAh. You can convert mWh to mAh.
mAh = (mWh / Voltage)
You can read: Key Presses for BIOS Settings
You might not be able to access the power test report like the one above unless you have an updated BIOS.
#6. Basic calculation to determine how long your battery will last.
Let's consider this image above. This is sourced from the BIOS settings of a system I used to prepare this blog. The full charge capacity of the system is 46188 mWh.
If you look at the image well, you will see terminal voltage at the middle right. That is the voltage that is delivered by the battery to the entire system. In the image, it is 11553 mV.
To convert milliVolt to Volt, divide milliVolt by 1000. That gives 11553 / 1000 = 11.553V. We are not done. We are going back to mAh.
You can use this conversion calculator to make things easier.
For this system, mAh = 46188 / 11.553 = 3997.9mAh.
To the final step, determining how long the battery will last drawing an avaraged current of 899mA as seen in the image.
Time (hour) = mAh / current
That gives 3997.9 / 899 = 4.44 hours. Now you know.
While you may not care about knowing all of these, it's just a way to be able to predict how many hours your battery can last.
Mind you, the battery of this laptop lasts longer than 4 hours and sometimes less. It will do so beacause sometimes it draws lower or higher than the current we used for calculation depending on the task performed on it. But 4 hours is the average time span.
#7 • Charge Cycles tell you how many time you can charge your PC's battery before it no longer holds charges again. A typical Lithium Ion battery should be able to go through at least 300 charge cycles. It might be more or less than that but usually around that. Once the maximum charge cycle is attained, it will no longer charge and then your laptop becomes a desktop.
#8. Now that you know how to generate battery report to monitor your PC's battery health, would you like to know some things that can decline your Battery's health?
1. Heat: Heat is a very dreaded enemy of any Lithium Ion battery. Heat distrupts the chemistry of the battery and declines the lifespan. To solve this, make sure your PC's cooling system is very much functional. Clear dusts from the cooling fan and heat sink, add cooling paste when it is dried out, replace the fan if its rpm has reduced so that heat will be expelled easily.
You can also read: How to Monitor Your Computer Storage's Health
2. Full-charging everytime: To make sure your system's battery last long, try to keep it below 80%. It's tested and trusted. Charging your battery up to 100% every time for any justifiable reason will degrade the battery's healty very fast. Not only that, when your system's battery is fully charged it begins to generate heat beacause you are giving it unnecessary charges which is converted to heat. Also, when you charge your system's battery to 100% every time, you will run out of charge cycles quickly. In a month, try not to complete 10 charge cycles. Your system's battery will thank you. :-)
Let's do the math: if you complete, say at most 8 cycles (maybe two in a week) in a month, in a year you'll complete around 95 cycles. In three years, your battery will go through around 290 cycles, round up to 300 cycles. So if you complete two cycles per week you'll be sure that your laptop's battery will last for at least three years. Isn't that great?
3. You guessed it: Discharging the battery to nothing. Discharging the battery completely will distrupt the battery's chemistry quickly. It is a very good practice to stop using your system when the battery is between 10% and 15%. Again, your battery will thank you. :-)
In essence, it's a good practice to leave your system's battery between 15% and 80%. It will last much longer.
#9. How will I be sure to get a genuine battery after my battery is due for replacement?
The trusted place to go to is to go to the place you trust. :-}
Well, I will recommend visiting the official website of your laptop's brand and ordering for a new replacement battery. You only need to know the serial number of the battery and everything will be settled. That's the surest and best place to go. There will be assured warranty if at all anything untimely goes wrong with the battery.
#10. Common myths about laptop battery
• Draining you battery till it shuts down by itself and then putting it in fridge for five hours to freeze will reset your battery.
This method worked for previous chemistries of battery like the Nickel based batteries but not for Lithium Ion batteries. Instead of resetting, it will ruin the battery even more.
• It is okay to put your system to sleep for hours instead of shutting it down.
I am a victim of this myth. I put my laptop to sleep overnight for a trial and I was shocked by the horrible stress I put my battery through. The full charge capacity dropped from 83% to 70% overnight. You won't want to try this out. BEWARE!!!
• It’s necessary to fully charge the battery after purchasing a new laptop or new battery.
It is not necessary to do so, though you can. In as much it's charged out of the box, you can start using it.
• You must discharge your battery completely before re-charging.
This used to hold for old Nickel based batteries but not for recent Lithium Ion batteries.
• Charging your system's battery and using it at the same time will ruin it.
No, this is not true. For me, I do this often especially when there's uncertainty in electricity supply or I want to supply more power to my system's CPU to make it clock to a higher frequency while performing heavy tasks, so as to make it perform faster. The only downside is that when you plug it in too often, it will go through cycles if you are not mindful and also heat will be generated if you don't unplug it when it is fully charged.
I hope you have gained a lot from this post. Please SHARE the link of this blog with many people to educate them on the proper use of their PC's battery.
This site's purpose is purely to inform and educate you about using your PC well. Your comment is very much appreciated.
Thanks for reading.
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