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+--- Thread: State of charge issue - Dell laptop (/showthread.php?tid=4408)
State of charge issue - Dell laptop - harm_less - 19-10-2025
I've noticed over the past day or two that the battery charge level is sitting around 20% despite being powered via the step down transformer. Battery symbol indicates that it is connected to the charger. Battery was replaced about a year back so disappointing if it's reached end of life already. Any suggestions?
RE: State of charge issue - Dell laptop - king1 - 19-10-2025
assuming windows, you can run at the command line
powercfg /batteryreport
look for DESIGN CAPACITY and FULL CHARGE CAPACITY - if they're miles apart it's stuffed. Often these are replaced with cheap chinese batteries with only 3 month or 6 month warranties, for this reason
RE: State of charge issue - Dell laptop - harm_less - 19-10-2025
I've just emailed the battery report through for your perusal. Replacement in Sept 2024 was supplied by my computer repair provider. If it's stuffed is it worth going back to them?
RE: State of charge issue - Dell laptop - king1 - 19-10-2025
that looks fine, and genuine, from what I can see
This bit means the capacity hasn't degraded at all...
DESIGN CAPACITY 96,997 mWh
FULL CHARGE CAPACITY 96,997 mWh
you could try unplugging the charger from the wall for a minute or so - they are reasonably intelligent chargers these days so it would be the equivalent of a reboot...
RE: State of charge issue - Dell laptop - nzoomed - 19-10-2025
Sometimes the power management drivers get messed up and windows stops charging the battery.
You can remove be battery in device manager and reboot the computer, see if that works.
RE: State of charge issue - Dell laptop - king1 - 19-10-2025
you could also try running it on the battery and see how it behaves, according to the report you should see a good 4-5 hours of run time or so, if it suddenly dies after some time, that would indicate a problem.
and if you haven't already "restart" the laptop, that tends to fix a few bugs - assuming it could be a reporting issue in windows. Restart is required, not shutdown/standby/sleep/closing of lid etc...
RE: State of charge issue - Dell laptop - harm_less - 19-10-2025
I've done a restart and unplugged the transformer/charger from the wall. SOC declining and showing 20% and now 1hr 30min whereas 24% was ~30 mins. I'll keep an eye on what happens as 5-10% SOC shows.
I upgraded to W11 a few days back and every update or restart drops all my logins so suspicious that the battery issue may also be related to the change to W11. The dropped usernames and logins is really starting to piss me off!