This free, ancient Windows app will watch over your laptop battery

One thing that always annoys me about Windows is that I never really feel like I know how long my laptop battery has before it runs out — and, conversely, how long it will be before it’s fully charged. An ancient utility holds both secrets.

When a group of PCWorld editors were brainstorming new article ideas, I suddenly remembered NirSoft’s BatteryInfoView, a freeware utility I hadn’t honestly thought about since before the pandemic. A few years of working at home, plugged in, meant that I hadn’t any need for a battery utility.

BatteryInfoView is about as basic as it comes. It was developed, according to the developer’s web page, in 2011, and hasn’t really been updated in the last three years. It’s an alternative — and some might argue a better one — to the Battery Report feature within Windows 10 and 11 that most people use to check their laptop’s battery. I use Battery Report regularly for battery rundown tests where I can set a task and walk away, discovering later how long the battery lasted.

BatteryInfoView will tell you right up front, however, how long you have before you need to plug in. As I said, it’s a utilitarian interface, and some of the most useful features are tossed in among the rest: battery health, for example, will tell you the relative health of your battery. Over time, as you use your laptop and then plug in — over and over — your battery will wear down and it simply won’t recharge back to its original state. BatteryInfoView will tell you this, as well as the number of charge and discharge cycles.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Mark Hachman / IDG

Mark Hachman / IDG

More importantly, the utility will track your usage. It will then guess how long you have before your battery runs down on your current activity, and how long you would have if you had begun the task on a full charge. Likewise, it will also tell you how long it will take to fully charge your laptop if you’re plugged in. You can even switch the view (hit F8) and the app will log your battery’s charge every minute, so that you can export it to Excel and create your own graph. Will BatteryInfoView do this for you? No. As I said, pretty basic.

It might be nice if some of this information lived in the Taskbar. (Lenovo’s Vantage software actually puts this info in the Taskbar, and for the life of me I don’t understand why every other laptop maker doesn’t follow suit.) It would be even nicer if laptop makers allowed you to easily swap out a laptop battery and replace it with a new one, prolonging the life of your laptop.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Mark Hachman / IDG

Mark Hachman / IDG

But they don’t, and we’ll have to live with it for now. Add BatteryInfoView to your PC, though, and you’ll have a better idea of how long your laptop battery will last.