Surface Diagnostic Toolkit: Check Surface Battery Information

Surface Diagnostic Toolkit is an exclusive tool to guide you through a set of software repairs and hardware diagnostics to quickly and efficiently uncover and resolve issues you are experiencing on your supported Surface devices. On top of that, it also lets you look up information about your device, repair common software issues, and validate your Surface hardware.

Today we will show you how to use the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit (SDT) to check your Surface’s battery health information, including your Surface power state, battery wear, designed capacity, current capacity, battery cycles, current charge, battery capacity readings history for individual battery in one summary report.

Table of contents

  1. Supported Surface devices
  2. Downloading the Surface diagnostic toolkit
  3. How to Check Surface Battery Health
  4. FAQs

1 Supported Surface devices

The Surface diagnostic toolkit works on all recent Surface devices starting from Surface 3, which has Surface UEFI. That includes:

2 Downloading the Surface diagnostic toolkit

The Surface Diagnostic Toolkit is a free tool from Microsoft hosted on Microsoft Store. To get it:

  1. Download Surface Diagnostic Toolkit from Microsoft Store here.
  2. Or go to Microsoft Store.
  3. In the Search box, type Surface Diagnostic Toolkit.
  4. Click “Free” or “Install” to install the app on your device.
    Download Surface Diagnostic Toolkit

3 How to Check Surface Battery Health

When the app is installed. To check your Surface battery health information:

  1. Launch the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit.
    Open Surface Diagnostic Toolkit
  2. Under the hamburger menu, select Battery Information.
    Surface Diagnostic Toolkit: Battery Information Menu
  3. Now your Surface battery information will be shown below.
    Surface Diagnostic Toolkit: Battery Information

4 FAQs

Check the following frequently asked questions that will answer questions you might have.

Question 1

What are the battery cycles shown in the Microsoft Surface Diagnostic Toolkit?

Answer
According to Microsoft, when a battery has been charged and then discharged, it counts as one cycle.

Examples: If the battery runs down to 60% and then it’s charged to 80%, it doesn’t count as a cycle. If the battery runs down below 10% and then it’s charged to more than 90%, it counts as a cycle.

Question 2

What is the difference between the designed and current battery capacity?

Answer

The designed battery capacity is the total energy storage measured in watt-hours (WH) or amp-hours (AH) that the battery was designed to have by the manufacturer. You can find the complete list of Microsoft Surface-designed battery capacities here.

The current battery capacity is the energy storage reported by the battery’s built-in control circuit inside your Surface. The battery is a consumable component that will lose its compacity over time. So it is normal to see the current capacity is less than the designed capacity.