One of the things to be really careful about when using a laptop is the battery which over time tends to reduce its charge and last less and less. Unfortunately, that of batteries still remains one of the limits of technology, after so many years you still cannot find a way to make them last more hours if not days.
READ ALSO: Increase / extend the battery life of the laptop
In Windows 10 it is possible to check the battery status, the duration estimate and its wear level with a special command, without downloading anything.
To do this, open the Command Prompt with administrator rights (search for the prompt or cmd in the Start menu, press on it with the right mouse button to run it as administrator).
You will then have to run the following command and press Enter:
powercfg / batteryreport / output "C: \ battery_report.html
Once finished, open the report.html file from disk C to find out all the technical details regarding the battery.
Among the information you can see the maximum capacity of the battery, the number of times it has been recharged, the consumption of the last few days and the history of battery use since the first time it was used.
You will also be able to read how good the battery is still, with the duration estimates based on the use of the portable PC.
In Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, a Nirsoft tool can be used, which develops portable programs for the management of Windows hardware and software components, allows you to know if a battery is still good by extracting all the technical information regarding the battery of a laptop, notebook, netbook or tablet.
With the BatteryInfoView tool you can clearly see the time remaining until the battery runs out and understand if the battery status is intact by comparing the maximum charge values with which it was manufactured (Current Capacity) and the maximum charge currently achievable (Designed Capacity).
The program displays information that is otherwise difficult to find such as the name of the battery, the manufacturer, the date of manufacture and the serial number.
Most importantly, it shows numeric and percentage data about the battery's state of charge, current capacity, integrity, full charge capacity, voltage and number of charge and discharge cycles .
Interesting is also the estimated value of the time required to recharge the battery (Time for charging battery).
The name of the battery manufacturer can be very useful for ordering a new battery in case it needs to be changed, since there are no identical standards for each model.
BatteryInfoView also comes with a mode that records battery status over time.
Pressing F8 you can record the battery status every 30 seconds or with a different interval.
A log file is then created which, if checked after some time, maybe 3 months, can be useful to check how many times the battery has been charged and to analyze the discharge rate of the laptop battery and check how quickly it is degrades.
You can change the battery check frequency or return to the default mode with F7.
BatteryInfoView is a portable program that does not require installation and that works on all PCs with Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and server versions.
Unfortunately, the program is still only in English and there is no translation into Italian.
Another program to check the integrity of the battery and its status is BatteryMon, also capable of recalibrating it.
In other articles, how to monitor the temperature and energy consumed and the guide on energy saving settings in Windows on laptops.
