Battery life is a strong selling point of many PCs, especially in the education market and premium markets. Users require their portable PCs to be fast, light and last long enough to be off the charger all day. Intel’s newest processors, for instance, have been working on improving the battery life utilisation, and Microsoft is moving to ARM for more battery life savings on PCs. In addition, Microsoft is also working on adding Power Plans to Windows so users can modify their data.
Laptop batteries can fail, or over time can lose their ability to hold a charge. If your laptop suddenly stops cooperating, you can usually determine if a bad battery is causing the problem by removing it from its bay (on the bottom or side of the laptop) and running the laptop from the AC adapter only. Windows 7 has added a lot of new features, some of them you can see, but some you can’t even see it. Here is one small trick you can do with your Windows 7 laptop. (assuming that you have your battery plugged in) We all know that over time, your lithium ion battery will not charge to its full.
If you aren’t getting as much battery as you think you should, a battery report on your PC can be illuminating. This is a system generated report which exposes your battery health, discharge rates, other statistics which are meant to help you understand just how bad or good your battery is at the moment.
Checking your battery health on Windows 10
- Open Command Prompt by right clicking on the Start button and running it as admin.
- Copy and paste the following command powercfg /batteryreport /output “C:battery_report.html [Note, C: can be replaced with any folder of your choice, so if you’re interested in saving it a battery reports folder you have stored in documents, you could easily amend that to C:usernamedocumentsmybatteryreportsbattery_report01/09/17 for easy labelling.
- This will output an HTML file with the specified name at the specified location.
- Open the file at the specified location. It should open in your default HTML file handler, this will be more often than not, your default browser i.e Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Google Chrome
Note: If you’re using a portable device, you can also navigate to Settings > to see just what apps you are using that might be eating up your battery life.