▷ How to calibrate the laptop battery 【step by step】

It is normal that one of the biggest concerns for a user of portable equipment is the autonomy of their device and the degradation it suffers. Today we are going to see how to calibrate the laptop battery in Windows 10, to try to extend the life of the battery as much as possible in our team.

In addition, we will see some interesting applications and tricks with Windows on how to monitor wear and the parameters in detail of our battery. And why not, some tips to maximize the autonomy of your laptop.

Index of contents

Calibrate the laptop battery What is it for?

The quality objective of a battery is not really to increase the autonomy of our equipment, but to reduce its wear and tear over time, and consequently use the maximum possible capacity of it.

Every battery is subject to wear over time, and this is inevitable. But depending on how we charge it, how much we use the laptop, and how many charge cycles it takes, it will suffer more or less, and a calibration can help us minimize this aspect. And to this, we add the management or monitoring that the operating system makes of it.

Windows, like any other system, has a meter of the amount of charge available and the estimated time of use of it. These values ​​will have direct influence with the calibration, since with the passage of time, it is possible that it marks a greater degradation than what we really have. Consequently, the battery will charge below capacity and will last less. Not to mention how inaccurate the estimated duration data may be, informing us for example that it will last an hour and after 20 minutes it is completely dry. This usually happens a lot in somewhat older equipment which has already been used a lot.

At this point, we must keep in mind that all batteries can be calibrated, but only the new generation Lithium-Ion batteries will give data about their wear. For example, computers that have a removable battery from traditional ones may not be able to obtain this information.

Check battery wear

Before starting to calibrate the battery of the laptop we will stop for a moment to see what is the wear of our battery. Or at least what is the wear that Windows marks our battery has. This will determine its full load capacity and autonomy. After calibration, it is good to do the same procedure to see if this wear has improved or remains the same.

We just have to open the Power Shell command terminal by right-clicking on the start and selecting its option. In it, we will put the following command:

powercfg / batteryreport

Next, we take the path that the command gives us to open the HTML that contains all the information about our battery.

The section that really interests us is the second, “ Installed batteries ”. Here the battery design capacity and maximum load capacity will be displayed. In the previous example we see that the LG has a battery of 72, 770 mWh of maximum capacity from the factory, and currently delivers a capacity of 68, 410 mWh, which means that it has a wear of 6%.

The following image shows a history of how this capacity has evolved over the time of use of the laptop. This history will have the oldest date the last time we install Windows or restore the system, which in this case is July 2019.

So you can see the difference with a new laptop, let's see this other image:

In this case we see that the battery has not yet suffered any wear since it only has one month of use.

Calibrate Windows 10 laptop battery

After seeing these results, it is time to proceed with the battery calibration, so we will carefully explain what we should do in our system or how to use the laptop during the process. Basically it is about carrying out a full charge and discharge cycle.

• The first step will be to charge the battery to 100% of its current capacity, so we connect the equipment to the power and keep it plugged in for an extra minute to ensure that charge.

Here comes the first thing to keep in mind, and that is that current laptops usually come with an OEM program that, among other things, allow us to modify the way we charge the battery. We must ensure that it allows charging 100% of the battery, since many times the charge cycle stops if the battery is more than 60% for example.

A clear example is the above, although other computers such as Asus, MSI or Dell have a similar function. Here we must make sure that the load does not stop, and that it continues up to 100%.

• Now it is time to completely discharge the battery until the equipment is turned off and there is no way to start it. We can continue using it normally until it runs out, or leave it with the screen on until it consumes power.

To make sure it doesn't hang up or hibernate ahead of time, let's tweak the power plan. So we will write in the beginning "energy" and we will be able to directly access the configuration of the current plan.

We recommend having it in “balanced” or similar, which will be the standard. Here we must ensure that, in the case of using the battery, the equipment never goes into sleep, and that its screen never turns off.

Optionally we can go to the advanced configuration of the power plan and verify in the battery section that the equipment will hibernate when it reaches a critical battery level of 5%. Although these parameters are already set at the factory in the balanced plan.

• To make sure it's dry, we try to boot, until we can't do it. Now it 's time to recharge the battery fully, 100%, but before, we are going to let the team sit for a few hours to remove all the heat from the battery. 1 or 2 hours will be enough, we connect it and we can use the laptop in the normal way, even resetting the parameters of the power plan to our liking.

The calibration process is over and Windows should better "understand" what's going on with our battery, providing more reliable data about remaining time, and even more accurate data on capacity.

At this point, it would be advisable to do a new battery report with Power Shell to see if the parameters have changed.

This process should not be done often, since as you know, discharging the battery completely often reduces its life time. And we should not charge it immediately after downloading, both on laptops and on mobiles.

Other programs to calibrate battery and see capacity

As always, the Internet offers us all kinds of extra options for this matter, in case we don't trust Windows enough. So we will see some examples of applications that do a similar monitoring function.

MSI Dragon Center

If you have an MSI laptop you will have Dragon Center. It is a program that allows us to interact with the hardware and software of our MSI, and it has a very complete section to manage the energy of the equipment.

In addition, it has an option to calibrate the battery. We just have to follow the instructions and the program will take care of everything, even providing us with the most recommended parameters for energy use.

BatteryMon

This free application with a fairly simple interface is one of the most complete we have in terms of monitoring consumption and parameters. In it, we can see a graph of consumption in real time, along with the download speed and the evolution of its capacity.

It does not have calibration options, but it is a good way to buy the time estimated by Windows for autonomy and that offered by this application. We can integrate comparative graphs to take into account all possible consumption scenarios and thus control how far we can go.

BatteryCare

This is another application similar to the previous one but more basic in consumption monitoring. The advantage of it is that it allows us to directly access the energy plans that we have in the team and select the one that best suits us at all times. Like the previous one, it gives us detailed information about our battery.

Tricks to improve laptop autonomy

We already know how to calibrate the laptop battery, but it is worth knowing how to maximize its autonomy. To finish, we are going to see some useful tips to improve the autonomy of our laptop or any other device.

• Control the brightness of the screen: this is the most basic of the basics. The screen is one of the elements that drains the most battery when we are doing light work with our equipment. The more brightness, the more consumption, so it is best to set it as low as possible.

• Power plans are important: they are not there as a mere decoration of the system. If we go to the advanced properties of the plan we can see that it controls many aspects of the equipment, such as the network, hard drives, CPU, RAM, graphics card, etc. Lowering the percentage of maximum use of these elements is in favor of our autonomy. Many teams include integration with Microsoft Azure, an AI that also monitors and improves team power consumption. The battery icon in the taskbar is your ally: we will always have an icon in the taskbar of our team, which if we deploy it we will have a bar to quickly modify the team's energy profile.

• Control applications in the background: the more applications we have installed, possibly more services and tasks will work in the background. This means higher processor activity, which translates to higher consumption. The cooling system also consumes: and much more if we are dealing with a gaming computer with powerful hardware. Typically, power profiles limit the CPU and consequently warm-up. But in other cases listening to the fans run and drawing hot air will mean high energy consumption, perhaps due to its low efficiency, or perhaps due to having heavy processes in the background.

We recommend our undervolting tutorial to improve laptop temperature

• Limit connectivity: For example, if we don't use the Internet, we can temporarily turn off Wi-Fi to save battery power. The same happens with Bluetooth, always active by default in Windows. And if we are in a hurry, then pull the plane mode. The same happens with peripherals, especially those with USB lighting or high-speed drives such as external drives. They all consume power from the ports.

Conclusion on calibrating the laptop battery

This is our tutorial on how to calibrate the laptop battery. As we can see, it is a fairly simple process and can give us good results on the capacity and autonomy of the battery, and above all more reliable values ​​and estimates.

Clearly, there are no wonderful tricks for a battery that lasts two hours to be able to last 4, the limitations in each case are what there are. But if we can reduce wear and tear and thereby extend the life of our team, well welcome.

We leave you with some tutorials that may interest you:

Tell us if this process has been useful. What do you do to save battery power in your equipment?