The battery life of a computer is one of the most crucial aspects, as it helps users manage their work and rely on their devices efficiently. Once fully charged, the computer gives you the leeway to travel or work from anywhere, hassle-free, without hunting for a place near a charging station.

But a painful experience for any new laptop or computer buyer could be its bad performance within a year of purchase. Whether it’s a new ultraportable shiny computer or a used five-year-old one, it is advised to do a regular performance check of the battery life. It enables you to keep an eye out for major issues and diagnose them at an early stage.

If you are planning to buy a new computer, then it is very important to check its battery life.

Windows laptops have a ‘Battery Report’ feature that breaks down whether your battery is still kicking or is on its last legs. But the battery report remains an under-the-radar feature, as there’s no way to access it through Windows’ settings menus. It can only create a battery report through the Command Prompt.

In order to determine the battery health of the new computer that you are planning to buy, here are some of the steps that need to be followed:

• Perform a Windows search for CMD or Command Prompt.
• Open the Command Prompt that appears as the search result.
• You can also find the Command Prompt in the Windows Start menu.
• A command line starting with C and ending with the user account name will appear.
• A blinking cursor will appear at the end of this command line.
• Type powercfg/batteryreport and press Enter on your keyboard.
• Command Prompt will give a battery life report and will be saved to the user folder.
• Folders will be listed in the Command Prompt.
• This will be your default user folder, which is C:Users<yourusername>.

In the battery report, scroll to the bottom, and you’ll find the battery life estimates section. This will give you an idea of how long the battery could last.

Some particular sections you might want to look at to get started include the following: installed battery, recent usage, and battery usage.

To judge the battery life of any computer, measuring real-world performance like browsing the web, word processing, multimedia editing, etc. is a tough one.

Further, it’s something most people can’t do and get accurate and reproducible results.

In this scenario, the battery report is something that comes in handy and gives an accurate result to make your decision about a computer.