How to find battery wear for a Windows 10 laptop
Battery wear is an indicator of the health of a battery. It’s a simple enough concept; the more worn out the battery is, the smaller life it has left. It is normal for a battery to die over time. It really doesn’t matter what type of device you’re using though batteries in laptops tend to have a smaller lifespan because of how often they’re fully discharged and charged.
There are plenty of apps to keep an eye on a battery’s health, but they give you a general health statement such as good or bad. If you’re looking for something more precise to judge the health of a battery, you’re looking for its wear value.
Battery health
Battery health is tricky to find beyond just a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘fair’ diagnosis. The information is often hidden by battery manufacturers, and third-party apps are unable to find it. It’s not clear why the information is blocked, but some apps can still find it while others can’t. You just have to know which app to use.
Battery report
Before we go into detail on how to find the battery wear level, try generating a battery health report. If the wear information isn’t blocked, the battery report will tell you what it is. If the information is blocked, you can move onto the other solutions.
- Open Command Prompt with admin rights.
- Run the following command.
powercfg /batteryreport
- Open the path the above command returns to view the battery report.
- Look for anything related to battery wear or the number of cycles the battery has gone through. If this information isn’t available, you will need a third-party app to find the wear.
Smarter Battery
Smarter Battery can find the wear percentage of a battery. All you need to do is download, install, and run the app. The left column will show you the wear percentage.
BatteryBar
BatteryBar has both a free and paid version. The free version is more than enough to find the wear for the battery. Install and run the app. It runs on the taskbar. Hover over the battery icon on the taskbar, and the pop-up will display information, including wear percentage.
BATExperts
BATExpert is yet another free utility that you can use to find battery wear. It doesn’t show you how much the battery is worn out. Instead, it tells you how healthy it is, which is the same thing if you do a little maths. Download, install and run it.
Take the value in the Health/Wear box and subtract it from 100 to get the wear value.
If you’re running on battery power and would like to get more out of a single charge, try these steps.
