All notebook computers (laptops) come with a battery. This battery is charged using an AC adapter cable that connects to the power port of your laptop. Depending on the battery capacity, a laptop can be used without AC power from 3-4 hours to 7-8 hours. As time passes, the actual capacity of a battery slowly goes down. This happens because of aging process, wear and tear or the repeated charging and discharging of the battery.
On a Windows 10/11 PC, the system stores the battery charge discharge cycle data in a file named SRUDB.DAT file which is located in the folder C:\Windows\System32\SRU\. This file is used by Windows to write information about the system resource usage (SRU). It contains information about many things related to the operating system and the hardware. With the help of a freeware program called BatteryHistoryView, we can access SRUDB.DAT and find all the information related to the laptop battery.
BatteryHistoryView is a portable program and should be launched with the administrator privileges so that it can access SRUDB.DAT file correctly. As soon as it is run, it starts to fetch laptop battery related data and display it in its window.
For all the events displayed, it shows the time, cycle count, designed capacity, fully charged capacity, charge level, charge percentage, active AC time, CS AC time, active DC time, CS DC time, active discharge time, active CS discharge time, active energy and active CS energy. All the displayed data can be exported to TXT, HTML, JSON, XML and CSV files for later use.
The data displayed depends on the database file created by the installed Windows system. This is why the application is limited by the operating system itself. First of all it works only with Windows 10 and Windows 11. And secondly, if you have reinstalled Windows, then SRUDB.DAT is deleted and create anew. This means that older entries will not be available in that case. Despite these limitations, BatteryHistoryView is a quick way to see when and how often you have been charging/discharging your laptop battery.
You can download BatteryHistoryView from https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/battery_history_view.html.