I have an older Lenovo PC laptop and I’m wondering how much longer until I need to replace the battery. Is there a way to assess battery health in Windows?
Modern batteries are way better than a decade ago, no question, but they still have a functional lifetime. Typically a LiON (lithium ion) battery is rated for 1,000 cycles or full charges, which should give you a couple of years of use, at least, but as a battery ages, it tends to not be able to accept as much power on a charge as when it was new. Over time, your great 5hr battery might decay down to 2-3 hours, and, eventually, even less. Once it’s kaput you could find a full charge depleted in under an hour or have to keep your device plugged in all the time. At that point, get a new battery!
The question is how you ascertain your battery health, a particularly important task if you are buying a computer used: Has the person used up 900 of those 1000 charges or 200? It’s not incredibly easy to check and ascertain, but there are some tools both in Windows and from Lenovo that can help you figure out the overall battery health of your Windows PC. Let’s have a look.
BATTERY STATUS FROM WINDOWS 11
Look at your Taskbar, there’s a tiny battery icon on the lower right that shows you the approximate charge. Click on it and you bring up a window with lots of shortcuts and system info:
You can see my battery is currently at 78% charge. Is that its maximum? One way to get more information on your notebook battery is to simply click on the battery charge indicator on this shortcut window.
It opens up Settings > Power & battery, as shown:
Here we can see that at 78% charge it estimates I have 4 hours and 21 minutes left. Doing the math that means that at 100% charge I should have about 5 1/2 hours of battery life. Notice that Windows warns me that by having my brightness set to “high” I am adversely impacting battery life; in fact, dimming the screen is an easy way to extend your battery life. And, um, apparently lower my carbon emissions.
Click on “View detailed info” and it’ll show a bit more information:
This isn’t much more and it’s so unhelpful that I can’t explain why it’s even included in this view, but… that’s about what you’re going to get from the standard Windows 11 system.
VENDOR-SPECIFIC BATTERY HEALTH: LENOVO
Like so many vendors, however, Lenovo has your back with its own custom apps that are probably already installed on your PC. Are they too often adverts to upsell you on apps and services? Well, yes, unfortunately, but there’s often some great info therein too. On Lenovo laptops the program of choice is “Lenovo Vantage“. You’ll probably have a shortcut to this program right from the Taskbar. Click on it and you’ll see a far more inviting battery status display:
Didja notice how Windows believes a 78% charge will give me 4 hours and 21 minutes, but Lenovo believes that a 77% charge is only good for 3 hours and 15 minutes? This is pretty typical for battery estimates and my suggestion is to always believe the shortest value and be surprised if you get more time than that.
From this point, click on “Battery Details” to open up the Lenovo Vantage program and go straight to the Battery info screen:
Now it’s dropped even further! 76% is now estimated to offer me only 2 hours and 17 minutes. Pretty soon I’ll have 70% and it’ll predict I’ll be out of battery in 9 minutes! 😵
Much more importantly, you can see critical data like the temperature of your battery: 27ºC = 80.6ºF, so that’s well within operating norms (if it’s over 38ºC / 100ºF you need to be concerned about how your laptop is able to cool itself). Notice that this battery only has a cycle count of 14 (it’s almost brand new!) but that it’s already unable to take a full 100% charge. That’s information you can glean from comparing the design capacity – 50.2 Wh – with the full charge capacity – 49.88 Wh. Not to worry yet, but as the full charge capacity drops, you just won’t be able to store as much power and the battery life will be shorter and shorter.
One more step: If you go to the Lenovo Vantage program’s home screen, you can get a quick assessment of the battery health:
It says: “The battery is in good condition. Full charge capacity represents the maximum capacity of your battery when fully charged. Note: The full charge capacity of your battery will gradually decrease over time”.
Basically, we’re good. Look for a similar vendor-specific program on your Windows PC and hopefully, it too will offer quite a bit more information about the health and operating parameters of your battery!
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