How to Generate a Battery Health Report in Windows 10

The Battery Health Report is an important tool which must be monitored as it will help prolong the life of the battery and your laptop.

Battery health is not the same as battery life/charge. Checking the estimated battery life or charge amount on your laptop or tablet is very simple. Click the battery icon in the notification area to show the percentage of battery remaining and the estimated time you have to work. When the battery is low, you can reduce the power management to conserve it, and when it runs out, you can plug in and recharge.

What is a Battery Charging Cycle?

All batteries can only be charged a finite number of times. The action of discharging and recharging a battery is called a cycle. A cycle is counted when the battery is discharged and charged at or over 100% capacity. For example, the battery at 100% is discharged to 15% and then fully charged in a cycle. A battery at 100% discharged down to 75% and then fully charged is not a complete cycle, but doing that four times is. Batteries generally only support around 800-1000 cycles before they degrade. Depending on the type of battery, this can be less overall charge, meaning you run out of power quicker, or the battery may not hold charge with the device off. In extreme cases, the battery may start to swell or even burst.

How to generate a Battery Report in Windows 10

In the Windows system, a great power management tool allows you to learn more about your battery information and behaviour over time. The report is called "Battery Report".

1. Right-click on the Start menu to bring up the menu
2. Command Prompt (Admin)
3. Copy and paste powercfg /batteryreport /output "%UserProfile%\Desktop\battery_report.html"
4. On your desktop you should see a file labeled battery_report.html, double click to open

The battery health report is made up of a few different sections. The first shows details such as the computer name and Windows versions. The next section lists the battery or batteries if you have more than one. You can see the type of battery, commonly LiP for Lithium Polymer or LION for Lithium Ion. Most importantly, you can see calculated battery design capacity and full charge capacity. These indicate the overall battery health.

You can also see recent battery usage when the battery charges and discharges and various statistics about the battery capacity history. You can see from this screenshot of my report that my Surface Book 2 has two batteries. The first isn't looking too bad. However, the second is showing a drop in full charge capacity of about 20%, which I will have to keep an eye on. You can also see the battery cycle count. However, I believe that is because the OS installation does not last the entire life of the battery, so if you reset your Windows 10 laptop to factory settings, this will revert to zero.

How to Minimize Battery Wear

There are several things you can do to help extend the life of your laptop battery, as well as things you can do to speed up the deterioration of your battery capacity.

The first and most important thing is to use the device normally and not worry about discharging or recharging the battery regularly. The device is designed to be used, and batteries will last at least five years through heavy use and much longer in lighter use. The 20% degradation you see on my battery health report is over two and a half years' worth of heavy usage, and I use it for work, gaming, and writing. It's used for over 12 hours daily, plugged in or using the battery.

However, keeping your device on charger constantly without allowing it to discharge will eventually burn your battery.

Also, do not let your device run out of charge and leave it for too long, as the battery may go on a deep discharge you can't recover from. If you're storing the device for a prolonged period, you should charge the battery roughly 50% and store it like that.

How to Check Which Apps Use the Most Power?

You can see which apps are consuming the most power on Windows 10 or Windows 11 by going into the Settings > System > Battery applet. You can also hit the Windows Key, type Battery, and click the app from the search results.

This app will allow you to see the current battery level and status, enable battery saver, and see battery usage per app for over 24 hours or a week. It will only show apps when you are on battery, nothing will show when plugged into a charger, and it won't work on desktops without a battery.

How to Generate a Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report

The energy report is more technical than the Battery applet above. This report runs over a short time and analyses applications and all processes that may be outdated or misconfigured, including drivers. It is possible to get information on how much energy they consume. It will hint at any applications running in the background that use much power. If you don't use or need it, uninstall it to gain extra battery life.

Open Command Prompt as Administrator and enter the following commands.

powercfg -energy /output "%UserProfile%\Desktop\energy-report.html

After a minute, the report will be generated on your desktop. You can run a longer report to gather additional profiling statistics using the /duration switch followed by the number of seconds to run. 60 is the default; you can use 120 for two minutes.

powercfg -energy /duration 120 /output "%UserProfile%\Desktop\energy-report.html

C:\WINDOWS\system32>powercfg -energy /output "%UserProfile%\Desktop\battery_report.html
Enabling tracing for 60 seconds...
Observing system behaviour...
Analysing trace data...
Analysis complete.

Energy efficiency problems were found.

5 Errors
24 Warnings
69 Informational

See C:\Users\ttrott\Desktop\battery_report.html for more details.

The report sections will show any errors in the power settings, warnings, and informational messages. In my case, there were several issues to fix from the report. Some of which I list below, you may have different issues to address.

1. Power Policy:Sleep timeout is disabled (Plugged In)
2. USB Suspend:USB Device not Entering Selective Suspend
3. CPU Utilisation:Processor utilisation is high
4. Devices with missing or misconfigured drivers can increase power consumption. - PANGP Virtual Ethernet Adapter
5. CPU Utilisation:Individual process with significant processor utilisation.

The report will also show information about various settings in the current power plan, usually a balanced personality from the device manufacturer. It also gives hints as to a few settings you can optimise.