No matter how well you treat your laptop’s battery, it will eventually die. If you’re lucky, it will be time to replace your laptop by the time its battery dies. If you’re not, you’ll need to replace the battery.

Battery death can seem sudden, but it doesn’t have to. Windows will warn you when your battery reaches extremely low capacity levels, but you can also keep your own tabs on its capacity.

How to Check Your Laptop’s Battery Capacity

If you’re curious just how far your laptop’s battery capacity has declined, you can use a third-party tool to view it. NirSoft’s free BatteryInfoView does this well, displaying the battery’s approximate wear level, the capacity it was designed to have, and the capacity it currently has.

For example, in the below screenshot, we see that the battery was designed to hold 86,580 mWh of energy. However, the battery’s current capacity at full charge is only 61,261 mWh. In other words, the laptop’s battery only holds 70.8% of its original capacity when fully charged.

Some batteries may display more information, such as the number of charge and discharge cycles they’ve been through.