The battery status on my 3 year old Dell laptop shows Fully Charged 100% when plugged in but then drops to 92% as soon as I unplug the charger. Why does Windows 10 the report battery status like this?
It might be your battery and not windows 10. Sometimes a battery will hold a fixed charge point. Have you checked with Dell on how to completely drain your battery?
@steveC, You should generate a Battery Usage Report. This will tell you a lot about your battery and its health, including the maximum charge it can hold compared with its design capacity.
Battery Usage Report - Generate in Windows 10
That report shows the battery design capacity is 57,720mWh. The full charge capacity was the same figure until Aug 16 when it dropped to 54,834mWh and has been that value since. That's a reduction of 5%. The original battery life estimate is 5:49: 03 and is now 5:31:36. That's a reduction of 5% again. This differs from the reduction of 8% reported by Windows. Does this indicate my battery is starting wear out or is there some way of resetting it?
No, that looks good for a Li-ion battery of its age. There's an inevitable small loss of capacity with each recharge cycle. 5% is nothing to be concerned about, plenty of life left in it yet. What this indicates is that Windows is misreporting the battery status.
Try recalibrating the battery so that Windows can estimate its capacity more accurately. There may be specific instructions in the manual for your model. Dell's general guidance is here.
On-the-Go articles | Dell
If that has no effect, try going to Device Manager and uninstalling the 'Microsoft AC Adapter' and 'Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery'. Then scan for hardware changes (on Device Manager's Action menu) to reinstall them.
Last edited by Bree; 11 Mar 2017 at 10:35.
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