How To: Run Battery Report on Surface Tablets

Surface RT and Surface 2 use an internal lithium-ion battery designed to go everywhere you go. The amount of time your battery lasts varies depending on the kinds of things you do with your Surface. Here gives the way to run Battery Report on Surface Tablets. 

Have you wondered how your Surface tablet’s battery is doing? Has it seemed to be going dead more rapidly lately but, you don’t know for sure?

Well, if you’re having problems or just curious, you can always run a battery report against your Surface tablet.

A battery report is very helpful for helping you figure out how your battery(s) is performing by showing you things like…

• A 72 hour graphic usage history including charges and drains
• How much power (in mWH) your battery(s) is holding
• Capacity history (good for seeing if your battery is failing)
• Estimates on how long the battery should last

As you might imagine, this can be quite helpful in determining if you are having a problem with your battery and may be requested of you if you contact Microsoft tech support with problems like:

• Short battery life
• Frequent reboots
• Overheating issues

OK, now that you know what it’s good for, you can follow these steps to run a battery report on Surface RT/2 or Surface Pro/Pro2 tablets.

Run Battery Report on Surface Tablets:

• Bring up the search charm
• Search for cmd  
• Chose Command Prompt from the search results
• In the Command prompt window that came up on your desktop, type in “powercfg /batteryreport” and hit Enter
  
• It will generate a report file and tell you where it is located. Usually it will be placed in the c:\users\ folder and it will be named battery-report.html
  
  
• Browse to that location and open the report

I hope you found this procedure helpful.

Personally, since it only goes back 72 hours for most things, I recommend running a battery report every month or two and keeping them so you can compare trends over a long period of time. It could be very helpful if you are trying to determine if your battery is starting to fail at some point in the future.