2 Best Ways to Fix Windows 10 Battery Time Remaining Issues

On any laptop (or tablet) running Windows, by clicking the battery icon in the taskbar menu or by hovering your mouse over it, you should see an estimate of remaining usage. In other words, how long your laptop should last on battery. If your Windows laptop’s battery section doesn’t show an estimate of “ time remaining, ” there’s a problem somewhere, and we’ll show you two ways to fix it.

Although the battery estimate indicator is not always accurate and is actually only an “ estimate ”, it is a pretty useful feature. By default, it is always enabled on a Windows device. Certain factors could make it disappear on your laptop. Updating your device’s operating system to a bug or beta (Insider) version of Windows could hide the battery estimate indicator. The Windows 10 Creators Update contained this bug. An incorrect or incomplete operating system update could also break your laptop’s battery life indicator.

Whatever the case, the remaining battery time / estimation problem can be solved. Sometimes it sucks not to know how long your laptop would last before needing to charge. If you’re having trouble estimating your Windows laptop’s battery, one of the fixes below should help put things right.

Update Windows 10

Your laptop could be running a buggy version of the Windows 10 operating system that messes up the estimate of battery life. If so, updating your laptop’s operating system could help resolve the issue.

Step 1: Press the Windows + I key simultaneously to launch the Windows Settings menu,

2nd step: Select “Updates and security”.

Step 3: If updates are available in the Windows Update section of the page, press the Download button to install.

Note: Make sure your PC is connected to the Internet.

After installing the update, check if the estimated battery time for your laptop now appears when you hover over it or click the battery icon in the taskbar. While you’re at it, you need to open Device Manager and update the drivers for major components such as the processor, chipset, and graphics.

If all of that doesn’t solve this problem, you should try the second method below. Although this is a bit technical and tedious, it would make the estimation of the remaining time of your PC’s battery work again.

Adjust Windows registry

The Registry Editor is a tool for making changes to certain hardware and software configuration settings on their computers. To solve the problems of estimating the battery life of your laptop, you must modify two entries / keys in the Windows registry: UserBatteryDischargeEstimator and EnergyEstimationDisabled.

When enabled, these two inputs would prevent your laptop from displaying the estimated usage time you can get from your laptop’s battery. The hack is to delete these entries and create a new entry that displays the battery estimate. It’s very simple to do, really. Just follow the steps below.

Step 1: type regedit in the Windows search box.

2nd step: Launch Windows Registry Editor by clicking “Run as administrator” or simply press the Enter button on your keyboard.

The next thing to do is to navigate to this directory (Computer HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Control Power) in the Registry Editor. We will explain the steps below.

Step 3: Expand the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder by pressing the drop-down arrow next to it.

Step 4: Then expand the SYSTEM folder.

Step 5: Under this folder, expand the CurrentControlSet folder.

Step 6: Now expand the Control folder.

Step 7: And finally, scroll down and find a folder called Power. Now press the folder.

Step 8: Look for an entry named UserBatteryDischargeEstimator, right click on it and select Delete.

A warning prompt informing you that deleting an entry from the System Registry could cause system instability would appear. Press Yes to continue.

Step 9: Locate the EnergyEstimationDisabled entry, right click on it and select Delete.

Press Yes in the pop-up window to confirm the deletion of the entry.

Now create a new entry called EnergyEstimationEnabled in the Power folder. This entry is responsible for displaying the battery estimate (or what some people call “remaining battery time”) on a Windows computer. For that, proceed as following.

Step 10: Right-click the Power folder in the left pane of the Registry Editor.

Step 11: In the context menu (context menu), place your mouse pointer over New and select the option ‘DWORD value (32 bit)’.

Step 12: Rename the newly created entry to EnergyEstimationEnabled and press the Enter button.

Step 13: Now right click on the EnergyEstimationEnabled entry and select Edit.

Step 14: Change the input value data to 1 and press OK.

Step 15: Close the Registry Editor and restart your computer. Upon restart, you should now see an estimate of the number of hours or minutes of use of your current battery level (in percentage).

Get the right estimate

Knowing how long your laptop battery will last is essential to effectively maximizing its usage, especially if you don’t have your charger with you. Simply update your computer’s operating system (if one is available) or go directly to the Registry Editor to fix the problems yourself.