How to learn about your laptop's battery life

Do you have a refurbished laptop and want to find out what kind of battery life it has?. Find out what's "under the hood" on either a Mac or Windows laptop is easy.

On a Mac, go to the Apple menu on the upper left corner, click and pull down to About This Mac. On the About This Mac Overview screen, press the "System Report" button, which will generate a report on all sorts of system information.

In the report, on the left, scroll down and select "Power" to display the battery information, which includes battery condition (it should read "Normal"), the number of charge cycles (lower is better) and the number of milliamp-hours the battery is holding along with the original full-charge capacity. The report can also let you know whether the battery is fully charged or still charging.

For more info, go to support.apple.com.

On a Windows laptop, go to the Start button (lower left), scroll the program list to Windows PowerShell; select it and launch PowerShell. A new window with a flashing cursor called a command prompt will appear. Type in the following: powercfg /batteryreport /output "C:\battery-report.html" and then hit the Enter key. This command asks PowerShell to run a battery report and save the output as an HTML file called battery report on the root level of your C drive.

PowerShell should tell you the report was saved. Open your C drive from the Windows File Explorer (right click on the Start button to launch the File Explorer) and double-click the file called battery-report.html to launch that file in a browser.

The report lists more information tons of information about the battery, including the designed capacity, maximum current capacity and cycle count.