Last week I got my new Surface Pro. At the same time I decided to give up my iPad Air. My plan is to do everything quick on my new iPhone X (f.e. studying and so on) and to use the new Surface Pro for more advanced tasks. It’s nice to have a Windows Tablet/Laptop on which I can fully administer my blog and do some more demanding work.

Ok, let’s come to the point. I discovered that the Surface Pro has a worse battery life time than the iPad. So far so good, the iPad is more focusing on simple tasks and you cannot compare a full Windows 10 to a slimmed Apple iOS.

I have known the powercfg command for a long time. But what I didn’t know is that the command can create a very nice HTML report of my battery with many stats and an estimated life time. Windows is unfathomable 😉

Using powercfg

To create one open Windows PowerShell or cmd with administrative privileges. Windows PowerShell can be found by using the “Ask me anything” Windows Search.

Type PowerShell into the search, right click “Windows PowerShell” and  select “Run as administrator”.

Now enter

powercfg /batteryreport

This will create a file. Note the file path. It may differ from mine.

The Battery Report

Now open Windows Explorer. Open the battery report.

General Battery Information

It’s really a nice view. At the beginning there is information about the Battery.

Recent Usage

And further down a detailed list of usage.

There are 3 states:

• Connected Standby: The device is in Standby Mode (Battery: 5 min, Plugged in: 10 min). Battery drop is about 1-2 % per hour
• Active: The device is in use
• Suspended: The device is in hibernation mode (after 6 hours standby the device hibernates). Battery drop: very little to nothing

Graphs

If you like graphs, here they are:

History

This is a nice overview, too. It shows the usage history by day.

Battery Estimated Life

That’s probably the most meaningful part. It shows the estimated life time of your battery.

Ok, so the estimated life time of my Surface Book is about 8:50. It’s ok for me.

Regardless of the battery life, the Surface Pro is a truly outstanding device.

The Sleepstudy

For even more information there are further parameters. For example you can use the parameter sleepstudy to create a report about what’s going on when your device is sleeping.

powercfg /sleepstudy

This creates a sleepstudy-report.html on C:. Consider, it’s a very detailed report.

Power Saving Tips

There are some recommendations from Microsoft to save power that can be found here:

https://support.microsoft.com/ms-my/help/20443

What’s your battery life time?

See you next time we focus on PowerShell again!