How to Generate a Battery Health Report on Windows 8 or Windows 10

Microsoft added a hidden “Battery Report” feature to Windows in Windows 8. Generate a report to see health information about your battery, how its capacity has decreased over time, and other interesting statistics.

The Battery Report is generated by Windows 8's Power Configuration Utility, which you run from the command line with a special switch. You can also use PowerCfg to generate an “Energy Report,” which will give you recommendations for ways you can reduce your computer’s energy usage and extend its battery life.

This article will help you how to generate a detailed battery usage report for your Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows RT, Windows 8.1, or Windows RT 8.1 PC (ex: laptop, Surface, or tablet) that runs on a battery.

Here's How:

1.   The actual battery report you’ll be generating is an easy-to-understand web page file. You just have to run a single command to create it. First, open a Command Prompt window. Right-click in the bottom-left corner of your screen or press Windows Key + X, and then click the Command Prompt option in the list.

2.   In the command prompt, copy and paste the command below, and press Enter. The command will save a battery report to your user account’s directory. That’s at C:UsersNAMEbattery report.html. Head to your user directory in a File Explorer window and double-click the file to open it. 

powercfg /batteryreport

3.   Double click/tap on the html file on your desktop to open and see your battery usage report in your default web browser (ex: Internet Explorer).

4.   This is a copy of my laptop's battery usage report in Internet Explorer as an example of what is reported. The top of the battery usage report will give you general information about your PC as well as if your PC supports connected standby or not.

The Installed batteries section below gives you detailed information about the battery including the name, serial number, and manufacturer.

• Chemistry = Usually will be LION for Lithium-ion battery.
• Design Capacity = The amount of charge that the battery was designed to hold in mWh (milliwatt hours).
• Full Charge Capacity = The amount of charge that the battery will actually hold.
• Cycle Count = The number of times that the battery has used up 100% of its charge and then recharged, or the result of discharging to 50%, charging to full, then discharging to 50% again. Batteries have a limited amount of cycles to work through before they are considered consumed.

The Recent usage section below lists the power states that your system has gone through over the last 3 days. You will also see if the power "source" was AC or battery, and the remaining capacity shown as a percentage and mWh.

The Battery usage section below shows you the date and time in a chart and table for each instance when the battery was drained over the last 3 days.

The Usage history section below shows you the history of system usage on AC and battery power.

The Battery capacity history section below shows you the charge capacity history of the system's batteries.

The Battery life estimates section below will help indicate how long you can expect the battery to last at a "full charge capacity" and at "design capacity" based on the observed drains.