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•Arnošt Havelka

How to Check Sleep States and Make a Battery Report with powercfg

Use powercfg /a to list sleep states and powercfg /batteryreport to save a battery HTML report. What the browser simulator covers vs a real Windows PC.

How to Check Sleep States and Make a Battery Report with powercfg

powercfg is the Windows command for power settings: which sleep states the PC claims to support, and a battery health HTML report. Official switches are on Microsoft Learn: powercfg. There is no course lesson for this command yet. The in-browser terminal simulates powercfg /a and powercfg /batteryreport; use the CMD practice hub for more commands you can run in the browser.

Try the command

Check sleep states or generate a battery report

Build the command
powercfg[arguments]
powercfg
Terminal
C:\Users\Student>powercfg /a
The following sleep states are available on this system: Standby (S3) Hibernate Hybrid Sleep Fast Startup

What powercfg does

With no arguments, real Windows and this simulator print that the parameters are invalid and tell you to try /?. You always pass a switch.

/a lists sleep states the system reports (Standby, Hibernate, Hybrid Sleep, Fast Startup, or Modern Standby on some laptops). The list is hardware- and driver-dependent. Seeing Standby (S3) here does not prove your laptop will sleep in real life.

Generate a battery report

powercfg /batteryreport writes an HTML file. In this simulator the path is C:\Users\User\battery-report.html. On a real PC the path is printed in the output; open that file in a browser. The report is for laptops and tablets with a battery. A desktop may error or produce a thin report.

Terminal
C:\Users\Student>powercfg /batteryreport

Common mistake

Assuming every PC reports the same sleep states, or ignoring the file path in the /batteryreport output and searching the wrong folder.

FAQ

How do I see which sleep states my PC supports? powercfg /a

How do I generate a Windows battery report? powercfg /batteryreport, then open the HTML path it prints.

Where is the battery report saved? Wherever the command prints. In this sandbox that is C:\Users\User\battery-report.html.

Why do I see Modern Standby instead of Sleep? Some laptops use Modern Standby (S0 low power). That is a firmware/OS choice, not a typo in powercfg.

Knowledge Check

1 / 2

Which switch lists available sleep states?

References

These documentation links provide authoritative details for the commands used in this article.