In other words, this section lets you see how long the battery should have lasted as compared with how long it lasted.Īt the very bottom of the report, you will see a current estimate of the system’s battery life since the operating system was installed.
The report’s next section, shown below, provides battery life estimates at full charge compared to the design capacity. As such, you can determine if the system is failing to get a good charge. For each usage period, you can see the full charge capacity and the battery design capacity. If you scroll down some more, you can see the battery capacity history over the life of the laptop. For each entry, you can see the active time and connected standby time for when the system was running off the battery and when it is plugged in. You can see that the first entry on the chart was from January 2018, when I purchased that laptop. The interesting thing about the usage history is that it covers the laptop’s entire lifespan (or the operating system’s lifespan).
If you scroll down some more, you will see the system’s usage history. This section of the report allows you to see every time that the laptop has changed states and whether the laptop was running on A/C or battery and its remaining capacity.
The tablet portion has a battery, but there is also a battery incorporated into the keyboard that is designed to provide longer life when the device is used in laptop mode.Īs you scroll down, the next thing that you will see is a recent usage report, followed by a chart that tracks battery drains over the last three days.Īs you can see in the image above, Windows tracks the power states over the last three days. The Surface Book 2 has a detachable monitor that can be used as a tablet. In case you are wondering, the reason why there are two batteries listed is because this machine is a Microsoft Surface Book 2. Although the system summary and the battery summary are standard parts of the report, the information shown in the previous screen capture is somewhat abnormal because it lists two different batteries.
The first thing you will see when you open the report is a summary of the PC itself and a summary of the computer’s battery. You can see the first part of the report in the image below. The report itself is rather lengthy and is made up of several different sections. You can see what this looks like in the next image. This command causes the battery report to be opened in your default Web browser. Invoke-Expression C:\Reports\Battery.html Once the report has been created, you can open the report by entering the following command: However, the actual duration will vary based on your laptop’s hardware and its usage history. It typically only takes a few seconds for the PowerShell laptop battery report to be created. The report will be saved in the C:\Reports folder that was created by the previous command. The PowerShell report is going to be created as an HTML file with the name Battery.html. The fourth command is the one that generates the report. The second command switches to the C: drive’s root folder, and then the third command creates a folder named Reports. This command is usually unnecessary, but I included it just in case anyone tries to use this technique on a PC with multiple drives. The first command in this sequence (C:) causes PowerShell to switch to the C: drive. You can see these commands in action in the image below. Powercfg /batteryreport /output c:\reports\Battery.html To get started with our battery check, boot up your laptop and then open an administrative PowerShell session. Laptop battery check with PowerShell: Step 1 You can even use PowerShell to create a detailed report from all of the raw data. There is a wealth of laptop battery data that is readily accessible through PowerShell. Even so, it may not be necessary to guess whether your battery is performing as well as it once did. When this sort of thing happens, most of us probably chalk it up to an aging laptop or maybe the failure to get a complete charge. Even though I wasn’t subjecting my laptop to a heavy workload or long-duration use, it seemed as though the battery was draining more quickly than it should. Although I didn’t do any writing during the time we were gone, I did bring a laptop to check my security cameras, send a few photos to friends, and that sort of thing. Earlier this year, my wife and I took a massive cross-country road trip covering more than 7,000 miles.