Laptop Battery Test

A laptop's portability is made possible by the rechargeable laptop battery. The source of power problems in a laptop computer are therefore inevitably linked with the battery. Before you take the laptop battery for repair, to solve the power problems or replace it, you must be sure that the battery is indeed the reason for the power shortage. Laptop battery testing can help you ascertain that.

Normally, a lithium ion based laptop battery lasts for two to three hours after a full recharge. Of course, the time for which a recharged laptop battery can last depends on the energy consumption and the applications being run too. If you are using devices like the webcam and DVD drive, the power is certainly going to be consumed faster. Brighter the screen, more is the electricity required. Taking all these facts into consideration, the laptop battery life can vary over a wide range. However, you have a cause for concern if a fully recharged laptop battery lasts only for ten to fifteen minutes!

If your laptop's standalone time has lowered to a few minutes, chances are that you have serious problems with your laptop battery. In such a case, you should immediately go for a battery test to ensure that the battery is indeed the source of the power shortage problem.

For laptop battery testing, you really do not need any advanced software or physical device. Through simple logic, you can decide if the battery is indeed the culprit. Here are two tests that can help you ascertain its working condition.

How to Test a Laptop Battery?

To test the battery, you need to check its charge retentivity and voltage when charged fully. The trick is to identify battery condition through simple logic of elimination. A simple way of checking battery life is going through the monitoring mechanism of the disk operating system. It can show you the percentage of charge. However, there is no internal troubleshooting mechanism that can identify the cause of an abnormally fast battery discharge. Here is how you can check it through testing.

Test #1: Remove Laptop Battery & Run On Direct Power
Locate the battery bay at the back of the laptop, open it and remove the battery. Connect the power adapter and start the laptop on directly fed electrical power. If it works fine in this mode, then you may have a bad battery. In some cases, the battery might be okay, but you may have a problem with the charging device which has lost its efficiency. This is one of the most foolproof ways of ascertaining whether a bad battery is causing the energy problems.

If the laptop still doesn't perform well, after direct power input, then there is an internal problem in the laptop that is causing the power loss. You may have to contact a computer technician or the manufacturer.

Test #2: Replace With Another Battery to Check
Another thing that you could do is replace the current battery with a healthy battery, charge it and see what happens. If the charge again runs out, the culprit is not the laptop battery, but a problem with the internal circuitry. If the laptop functions well and the charge lasts, clearly you have a defective battery. Use the laptop resources efficiently to ensure a longer battery life.