Watching the battery level on our devices is something many of us do instinctively. We always want to make sure we have enough power to get through the day, or through a specific portion of time when we can’t get to our chargers. But if you’ve tried to look at the battery indicator on your laptop, you might have noticed that the estimated time left rarely lines up with what you actually get. Thankfully, if you want to get a clearer picture, you can create a battery report on Windows 11 (and previous versions) to learn all there is to know about it.
The thing about the battery indicator on the taskbar is that it usually only gives you an estimated battery life based on what you’re doing at that time, plus it might not take into consideration how worn out your battery is if you’ve had the laptop for a long time. If you want a more detailed picture of what you can expect from your laptop’s battery, though, Windows 11 still makes it relatively easy to create a battery report and read it.
A battery report will include all the information you could want about your laptop’s battery, including who made it, design capacity, historic usage data, and battery estimates. Here’s what you need to do to create a battery report of your own.
Creating a battery report on Windows 11
While it may sound a bit technical, creating a battery report is actually very easy and risk-free. Here’s how it goes:
- Right-click the Start icon on your taskbar (or press Windows key + X) and then choose Terminal (Admin) from the list of options. If you’ve uninstalled Windows Terminal from your PC, this option will read Windows PowerShell (Admin).
- Accept the user account control (UAC) prompt, which will require administrator privileges.
- Copy the following text and then paste it into the Windows Terminal/PowerShell window: powercfg /batteryreport /output “C:\battery_report.html”
- This will output the battery report as an HTML file in the root of your C: drive. You can export the file to any folder you want by changing the path specified at the end of the command.
- Hit Enter and the report will be generated.
That’s all you need to know about creating the battery report, but then there’s the matter of reading and understanding what it says.
What’s in the battery report
There’s quite a lot of information inside a Windows 11 battery report, so we’ll try to help you make sense of everything that shows up here. To open the battery report, go to the folder you specified in the command above, and find the file called battery_report.html. Then, let’s take a closer look.
The top of the report includes some general information about your laptop, including what version of Windows you’re running as well as your firmware. This shouldn’t be the most interesting part of the report, but what’s next is a bit more interesting. The first section is called Installed batteries, and it’s a rundown of information about the battery inside your laptop. This includes the manufacturer, the chemistry – which will almost certainly be Lithium-ion (LIon) – design capacity, and full charge capacity.
There can be a bit of a discrepancy between these two capacity values, and the one that will matter the most is the full charge capacity, since that’s how much power the battery can actually hold.
Next up, you’ll see the recent battery usage information. The first table includes a list of recent power state changes over the last three days, as well as the battery conditions at that time. Every time you unplug the laptop, put it to sleep, and so on, that’s logged here. Below that, there’s a chart that specifically shows the power drain of the laptop over the past three days. Naturally, this will only include any information if you’ve used the laptop on battery power. This lets you see how quickly the battery discharged while you were unplugged from an outlet, so you can get an idea of how long your battery lasts.
The next two tables have even more historic data. The data in this chart will include information about battery usage since the last time you performed a clean install of Windows, or since you bought it. The first table includes a summary of the time your laptop was used each week. This aggregates the active usage and connected standby times, both while on battery and while plugged into an outlet. The next table includes information about the battery capacity of your laptop over time, so you can see how much it might have worn out.
Finally, there’s the section that might interest you the most, battery life estimates. The data in this table is also based on all your historical battery usage data, so you can see estimates for how long your battery might last based on your usage and battery capacity, for both active usage and connected standby. This also includes the estimated power consumption per 16 hours while using connected standby, so if you’re taking the laptop out for a whole day, you can know whether can stay charged when you’re not actively using it.
For older dates, this information is aggregated by week, but the last seven days are shown individually. At the very end, you can also see an overall estimate based on all the battery drain cycles since you installed the operating system.
With all of this, you should be able to gauge exactly how long your laptop’s battery should last when it’s fully charged. It’s the best way to learn everything there is to know about your laptop’s battery, and it might help you determine if you should replace it. If the poor battery life on your laptop has left you wanting a new one, you can check out our list of the best laptops you can buy today.
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source https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-create-battery-report-windows-11/