worried about laptop battery

How old is the laptop? Also built-in HP apps can diagnose any issues. However based on my experience my HPs seem to make big jumps when I use them, like it is 100% and after an hour it is down to 94% without in battery percentage. So you use it for sometime and you will notice things are fine.

I really don't want to pollute this thread but here's my own experience.
I have a hp zbook 14u g6 since 2020. It's a business level workstation. First, most hp apps are very bad with screen reader accessibility. I bought this laptop $1800 (taxes and warranty included + 50% off to everything), so about $3000 for the laptop alone. Its maximum battery was 7hrs fully tweeked with windows 10 back then unlike the claimed 14 hours factory capacity. Then in 2023 I started to notice regular battery wear, it was barely lasting 3hrs. I wasn't too worried though thinking oh it's okay this is perfectly normal for batteries and still have my extended warranty, let's just send it for repair.
TLDR: I sent my laptop to hp 3 times and each new battery which did have 100% capacity and 0 cycle count at the beginning with powercfg was literally worst than the previous one. Result? I bought a mac because I can't trust windows laptops (or at least hp( anymore with batteries. And because of arm... Well battery is the least of my worry now.
Try to execute powercfg /batteryreport in cmd. The tables are not very accessible I think but you'll have an idea of what's going on.
Hope your experience is better than mine.

Open the file and use the NVDA find command, type capacity, you will land on capacity, ctrl+alt+right arrow once, you will get current capacity, now ctrl+alt+down arrow you will land on full capacity, compare both numbers to kno what is going on with your battery.

I have worked with the battery report before, if you want help making sense of it feel free to paste the text of the report here. Please just be sure to delete any personally identifiable information. The big thing to be looking for is the numbers regarding capacity.

If I am understanding this correctly, your computer originally had 39,373 Megawatt hours of battery life. Ideally this will be a brand new battery at max capacity with zero charges, or in other words has never been plugged in to charge up.
Currently your battery has a maximum charge of 39,200 MWh. There is a formula for this, but I have since forgotten it. However, the formula would tell you how many hours per day your battery will last based on its current megawatt hours, over its max when it was brand new.

Somebody more educated than I can probably Answer this one for you.

Hi Treky Fan,

Below are my thoughts on your battery report:

• Design Capacity is what the battery is designed to charge to when new.
• Full Charge Capacity is what the battery can currently charge to.
• Batteries lose capacity over time and with use, so some decrease is expected.
• From what I'm reading of your report, your battery is designed to charge to 39,373 MWh and it can currently now charge to 39,200 MWh.
• Doing the math (dividing the full charge capacity by the design charge capacity, then multiplying the result by 100), your battery can currently charge to about 99.6% of its original capacity. This is really good.
• Put another way, whatever is going on, it isn't a battery capacity issue.

You mentioned your laptop is an HP. I had an HP EliteBook for a short time last year and played around with the battery health management settings a bit. Those with more HP laptop experience can probably speak more to this, but one thing I remember are some battery health settings that if the battery is set to stop charging at 80% to preserve longevity, it will still show the end-user 100% charge level to avoid confusion. I don't know if those settings are enabled on your laptop or not, but it may be worth looking into. If your laptop has an HP Battery Utility (or something else with a similar name), that would be the place to start.

Windows recalibrates things from time to time. SOmetimes you are at 100% and Windows reports 5 hours remaining of battery life, then you're down to 94% and it is 10 hours of battery life remaining. Mac seems to be realistic and consistent in this context. At this stage I have no concerns about your battery. Never mind as far as there are no actual signs of damage like overheating, losing or acquiring charge too fast etc.
Good luck.

Keep checking on it periodically. It should update eventually with an estimated time remaining on battery life.

On my HP it does not show the time remaining. I read somewhere on HP's forum that it is done intentionally as percentage seems to be more consistent than estimated time.
See here:
https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-Notebooks/Battery-Remaining-Time-Not-Displayed/td-p/6193962/page/2

The only way to access the battery in a modern laptop is to open the entire bottom of the shell however in your case I wouldn't worry. It's probably just a windows update affecting the way the battery percentage is reported, the percentage is only an estimate at best and is pretty much black magic to even technical users.

Yeah, your numbers are pretty strong and go to battery university you'll understand that modern battery estimates are only that, estimates, and there is an insane amount of technology, engineering and black magic for the rest so we have the feeling of an accuracy with these numbers.

May be the way Windows estimates your battery percentage has gotten off-track, that can really happen.
Just run it unplugged for a day, let the battery drain all the way down to 0 percent. Even if it automatically shuts down, boot up again and eat up the reserve charge as well.
Then charge to hundred percent and hopefully Windows would get hang of your battery.
Don't do this above mentioned process every day, not good for battery.

The more normal procedure is charge it until a few hours after it shows as 100%, run it all the way down until it auto shuts down and leave it a few hours past that, then charge it all the way back up and leave it plugged in a few hours after. The circuitry that stop charging when it's full and so on are entirely independent from the battery percentage calculation and are more reliable ways to judge when it's full or empty, they just aren't useful anywhere in between.