How to check battery capacity on Windows 10
Batteries, whether they’re on a laptop or on a phone, will deteriorate over time. With laptops, you can prolong their life somewhat by not charging and discharging them frequently. Even with any precautionary measures you would take, your laptop’s battery will reach the end of its life at some point. The deterioration may be slow but you can check if it’s started. When a battery begins to die, it is able to hold less charge. Basically, the battery capacity is reduced. Here’s how you can check the battery capacity on Windows 10.
Check battery capacity
There is a built-in tool on Windows 10 that lets you check the battery capacity for a new battery and how much it will charge per the device’s settings. Most users know it as the health report that can be generated from Command Prompt.
Open Command Prompt with admin rights, and run the following command;
powercfg /batteryreport
The battery report is saved here;
C:\Windows\System32
Look for a file called battery-report.html, and open it in a web browser. In the report, look for two fields; Design capacity, and Full charge capacity. The design capacity is how much charge your battery was built to store. The Full Charge Capacity is how much charge it can hold when it’s brand new. There may be some difference in these figures as you can see in the screenshot below. This difference may be attributed to battery protection being enabled.
BatteryInfoView
You can get a better more accurate view of your battery capacity on Windows 10 via a third party app. We recommend using BatteryInfoView by Nirsoft.
Download and run the app. It will give you the same information that the battery report did however, you fill find it gives you its current capacity both in mWh and in 100%. The battery on the laptop below hasn’t deteriorated at all in two years, it seems, though it’s always plugged in so that’s to be expected.
The battery report in Windows 10 doesn’t give you the current charge capacity. The full charge is something else and should not be confused with the current charge capacity of the battery.
When a battery begins to lose charge, your only option is to replace it. You don’t have to replace it right away. If your battery was originally able to last 5 hours, and it now only lasts 3 hours, you can still get use out of it for one more year at the least. The deterioration will accelerate the older it gets though so keep an eye on it.
You can take some steps to reduce power usage on Windows 10 if you know which apps are the most power hungry.
