How-To bring back the Remaining Battery Time Estimate in Windows
Windows is not known to be light on the battery usage and can easily eat up your battery within hours, leaving you running for the power chord in the middle of the day. While modern ultrabooks, thanks to amazing new advancements made by Intel in making their processors more power efficient, can manage to make it a whole day without dying down, most laptops are still not good enough when it comes to battery usage.
Microsoft did include a helpful little feature inside Windows besides the battery percentage called a Remaining Battery Time. The figure was a nifty thing that allowed you to gauge an estimate of how long your laptop’s battery will last, allowing you to make decisions based on that. For example, if it showed 4-5 hours of time left and you just need to work on some spreadsheets for a couple of hours, you won’t need to worry about it dying down in the middle of it. The time estimate is definitely a better indicator for how much battery is left than the battery percentage, which is irrelevant unless you are extremely familiar with your laptop’s power consumption capacity and can make educated guesses as to how long it will last.
However, in the recent versions of Windows, Microsoft has removed the remaining battery time indicator. Why did they remove it? Well, there was one big problem with the time indicator – it just wasn’t accurate enough. The depletion rate of your laptop’s battery depends completely on how you use it – if you perform performance-intensive tasks like video-editing, programming, gaming, etc. it is going to deplete your battery at a much higher rate than something like editing a spreadsheet or browsing Facebook. As a result, it is not possible to create a time indicator that can accurately predict when you will need a charger.
Nonetheless, the time indicator was still a useful little feature that helped you get an estimate. Considering the problems it had, if you still want it back on your Windows laptop, there is a still way you can do that.
It involves editing the Windows Registry. Before doing that, do read our guide on how you can make a backup of your Windows Registry to prevent any mishaps that could happen while editing it. Once you have done that, you can move on to our guide,
Bring back Remaining Battery Time
- Press WINDOWS+S to open Windows Search and type regedit, and click on the first search result that appears (as shown in the screenshot).
- Once in the Windows Registry Editor, you can use the left navigation pane to navigate to the following path,
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power
- Click on the Power folder to open the values inside it. Here, you need to delete two entries, just right-click on the value and click on Delete,
- EnergyEstimationDisabled
- UserBatteryDischargeEstimator
- Now, click on the Power key, as shown in the screenshot, and click on New, then select DWORD (32-bit) Value.
- Rename the newly generated value to EnergyEstimationEnabled.
- Now double-click on the EnergyEstimationEnabled value, and enter ‘1’ in the Value data text box.
Windows Registry changes are automatically applied once you restart your PC so all you need to do is restart your PC and you should start seeing the time indicator back to where it used to be.
If at any time, you want to remove it, you can restore the Windows Registry backup you created earlier OR you can remove the EnergyEstimationEnabled value by going to the same path.
