Steps to calibrate Windows 10 laptop battery
Some high-performance laptops come with built-in battery calibration tool, which can easily be used to calibrate laptop battery. However, a number (in fact majority) of laptop brands are not equipped with this calibration tool.
Nevertheless, there is no cause for worry, as there is a simple trick you can adopt to manually calibrate your laptop battery, and boost its lifespan.
For convenience, we’ll be showing you how to execute this manual calibration, in the next section of this article.
Method 1: Calibrate Laptop Battery Manually
Modify Your Power Settings
To manually calibrate a laptop battery, the first line of action entails changing the laptop‘s power settings. At this point, you would be required to change the power settings; to prevent your laptop from automatically going into sleep/hibernation/power saving mode, after few minutes of inactivity.
To change the power settings on Windows 10 laptop, follow the steps below:
1. Navigate to the taskbar on your screen display, and right-click on Battery
2. Select Power Options
3. Under Power Options, select Change when the computer sleeps
6. Select Never
7. Punch the Change Advanced power setting key
8. Click on the + (expand) symbol beside Battery
9. Click on the + (expand) icon beside Critical battery action.
10. Select Hibernate
11. Select the + icon (expand) beside Critical battery level
12. Under On Battery, select Percentage
13. Set the percentage to a low value: 1% to 5%.
14. Click Apply at the lower right-hand corner of your screen
15. Select OK > Save Changes
Once you’ve changed the power settings as appropriate, move to the next stage.
Connect Your Charger
Connect your charger, and juice-up the battery until it’s fully charged. Leave the charger plugged in (after the battery is fully charged) for a few minutes or hours (to enable it cool down).
Disconnect Your Charger
Remove the charger from your laptop and allow the battery to drain down (discharge). Once the battery is completely drained, your laptop will go into hibernation or completely power off.
Reconnect Your Charger
Reconnect your charger, and charge up the battery up to 100% again.
Note: You can use your computer during the recharge process, but it is better you leave it undisturbed
Calibrate Battery
Once your laptop becomes fully charged, the manual calibration process is complete. Your laptop should now show normal battery life readings.
After the whole process, you can reset your laptop‘s power settings (back to the original settings), or if you like, you can leave it as it is.
Method 2: Calibrate Laptop Battery Using BIOS
Some Windows laptops come with pre-installed battery calibration program, which is embedded in their BIOS. However, a number of laptop brands are not equipped with such program.
So, if your laptop has a built-in Battery Calibration program (in its BIOS), follow the guidelines below to calibrate your battery:
1. Power off your laptop and power it on again.
2. Enter the BIOS by pressing the F2, F11, F9, ESC... key at the boot menu.
3. Using the keyboard cursor keys, select the Power menu.
4. Navigate to Start Battery Calibration and click on the Enter key (this action will change your screen background to blue).start battery calibration
6. Once your laptop‘s fully charged (100%), disconnect the charger.
7. Allow the battery to drain (discharge) from 100% to 0%; until it automatically powers off.
8. Reconnect the charger (do not boot your system while it is charging).
9. Once it’s fully charged, the calibration process is complete.
10. You can then unplug the charger and reboot your system.
Method 3: Calibrate Laptop Battery Using Third-party Software
There are special software solutions, exclusively designed for calibrating laptop batteries. In this section of the article, we will be looking at prominent battery calibration software that are compatible with Windows 10 laptops.
1. BatteryInfoView
BatteryInfoView is a free app that is filled with information about your laptop’s battery. The tool has two primary components.
The first screen gives you complete battery information on Designed Capacity, Full Charged Capacity, Battery Health, Number of charge/discharge cycles, and more.
In this way, you can find out the rate at which the battery gets discharged. You can also export the battery information to a TXT or CSV file for reference.
Pros
- View detailed battery information in a single place.
- You can check the log to observe changes in the battery capacity.
- It lets you put the window on top over other apps to monitor the battery.
- It cannot filter the battery log with a date range.
- It does not show you any graph to predict the battery wear level over time.
2. BatteryMon
BatteryMon is an easy to use app that monitor’s laptop battery charge level by presenting a graph of its findings in real time.
The black line shows the current charge level. The blue line shows the trend line based on the extrapolated samples of data.
As you keep using the app, the discharge rate will become more accurate, and you’ll understand how battery health is deteriorating with different workloads.
Pros
- It analyzes the battery health with a real-time graph.
- You can set notifications for battery level, voltage, and temperature.
- Data on charging/discharging rate, time remaining on the battery, total time, and more.
- Log the battery’s performance for later reference.
- Compare and measure the current capacity with data collected in the past.
- The app is complicated for newbies.
- The graph can be overwhelming (Tweak the sample time in the configuration screen to make it simpler).
3. BatteryCat
BatteryCat is a simple utility to check battery charge, capacity, and charge cycles. The main window has three sections—the present charge state in relation to the current capacity, information about the power state, charge cycles, and full charge capacity versus the original design capacity.
C:\User\Your_Username\batterycat\batterycat.csv
With this log of data, copy the data to a spreadsheet app and monitor the battery’s health. By default, BatteryCat reads data from battery every 10 seconds. You can change this interval in the Options screen.
- The app gives you all battery information in a single place.
- It’s simple to use and extrapolates data without any knowledge.
- There is no filter option to segregate data in different time range or workloads.
- The app uses GTK runtime on Windows. As a result, you might experience tiny and blurry fonts.
4. Smarter Battery
Smarter Battery is the only app that offers you a complete suite of tools to monitor battery health, perform calibration operations, and save the battery performance data for reference.
It shows you the history of battery capacity during the charge/discharge cycles, computes wear level and discharge cycle count.
The Capacity page helps you understand the evolution of battery capacity. The Y-axis displays the capacity percentage and X-axis shows the data drawn at that time interval.
The Calibration page displays the complete picture of your battery life such as wear level, usage time, discharge cycles and more.
The app also offers you to save the battery data depending on the page you’ve opened. You can save battery information, capacity, calibration data, and more.
Pros
- At a time, you can monitor up to four batteries including battery packs.
- You can zoom in/out to modify the time interval and use arrow buttons to move forth/back in time.
- It can simulate the discharge mechanism to speed up the calibration process.
- There’s a green mode function to save battery power when in need.
- You can set alarms for low/critical battery and force standby/hibernate when battery power gets low.
- It has too many options scattered everywhere on the page.
- Can get confusing at times and can clash with the built-in power management settings.
5. BatteryCare
BatteryCare is a simple tool to optimize the performance and usage of your laptop battery. With its built-in algorithm, you can track the charge/discharge cycles.
When your battery completes a definite number of discharge cycles, it recommends you calibrate the battery.
The main window of the app shows all the detailed battery information like Designed Capacity, Full Charge Capacity, Tension, Wear Level, and Total Discharge Cycles.
It also monitors your CPU, hard drive temperature, and alerts you when it reaches a specific temperature.
- Low and Critical battery notification.
- It can switch to a power plan depending upon the state of your power.
- The power plan perfectly synchronizes with the power events of Windows.
- It only shows a summary of battery information and optimizes the usage of your battery.
- There is no other information—event data, logs, a record of charge/discharge cycles, and more.
- The installer is bundled with junk apps.
No matter how strong your laptop battery is, it will eventually become weakened, with time. The battery weakening process is gradual, such that you’ll hardly notice. At this point, battery life readings suddenly become inaccurate, throwing you into a state of confusion.
To prevent/avoid such situation, you have to calibrate your laptop battery, preferably once in every 2/3 months.
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