How Can You Check Your Windows Laptop’s Health Effectively?

January 14, 2025

As our Windows laptops tirelessly work for us, issues can gradually sneak in. If ignored, these issues may lead to costly repairs or even replacements. To ensure your laptop stays in top condition, you must routinely check its hardware health. Here are a few simple tips to help you do just that.

1. Inspect Your Battery’s Condition

Over time, a laptop battery degrades and loses its ability to hold a charge, impacting your device’s performance, runtime, and reliability. Ignoring early signs of wear can accelerate the degradation process and cause the battery to wear out faster. Overheating can also occur, which might hamper other internal components. To prevent these issues, regularly monitor your laptop battery’s health.

If you notice any problems, calibrate the battery and avoid overcharging to reduce wear. You can generate a battery health report to track critical battery details, such as charge cycles, capacity history, and estimated runtime. To create a battery health report, open PowerShell, type powercfg /batteryreport, and press Enter. Then, navigate to “C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\battery-report.html” to view the report.

Additionally, using tools like HWMonitor can provide deeper insights into your battery’s performance, allowing you to make informed decisions about necessary replacements. Regular maintenance, such as recalibrating the battery every few months, can help extend its life and preserve your laptop’s overall performance.

2. Evaluate Your SSD or HDD’s Status

Storage drives that hold your valuable data are susceptible to failure. If they wear out and you overlook the warning signs, they could fail, causing the loss of important files. By regularly checking the health of your drive, you can spot errors, bad sectors, or other potential issues early. This proactive approach gives you the chance to back up your data before a failure occurs and saves you from inconvenient data loss.

CrystalDiskInfo is a helpful tool for monitoring your drive’s health. It indicates the health of your drive—blue for “Good,” yellow for “Caution,” and red for “Bad.” It also shows vital statistics, including the operating temperature. For SSD drives, it shows “Total Host Reads” and “Total Host Writes,” which you can compare to the drive’s Terabytes Written (TBW) rating.

Regularly running diagnostics and maintaining an up-to-date software environment ensures that your storage remains healthy. Defragmenting your HDD regularly (not necessary for SSDs) and avoiding physical shocks to your laptop can significantly improve its lifespan. Awareness of your drive’s status and prompt action towards any alerts can save you from unexpected failures.

3. Examine Your RAM for Issues

A faulty RAM can cause crashes, freezes, and system instability. Even if one of the sticks malfunctions, you’ll experience slower performance. Testing your RAM helps identify issues with one or more sticks, allowing you to replace them on time. This prevents unexplained problems like BSODs (Blue Screen of Death) and ensures your laptop doesn’t break down when you need it most.

There are two ways to check for RAM issues. First, you can use the built-in Windows Memory Diagnostic tool, which detects problems with memory and notifies you of any issues, either automatically or through the Event Viewer. This tool is accessible and provides a basic level of diagnostic capability.

For a more thorough analysis, you can use MemTest86, which often identifies RAM issues that the built-in tool might miss. MemTest86 offers comprehensive test patterns that stress the memory thoroughly and can uncover issues overlooked by simpler tools. Running this test can take several hours but is well worth the effort to ensure RAM reliability and stability.

4. Verify Your Computer Display

Over time, your laptop display may develop issues such as dead pixels, color distortion, and other problems that impact your visual experience but are difficult to spot with the naked eye. Running a screen test can help you determine whether these issues relate to your laptop’s screen or stem from your GPU, graphics drivers, or other settings that can be easily fixed.

If your laptop doesn’t offer a built-in LCD screen test, like Dell’s BIST diagnostic, you can visit the EIZO website to run the test. Go through all the available options during the test to check for any display issues. If you notice abnormalities like dead pixels (dots that don’t change color), uneven lighting around the edges, or flickering, this indicates a problem with your screen.

So, you should have your device inspected by the manufacturer if it’s still under warranty or by a nearby technician if the warranty has expired. If no issues appear during the test, the display problems you’re experiencing are likely caused by something else and will need further investigation. Troubleshooting drivers or checking your GPU could reveal software-related issues that are more straightforward to fix.

5. Assess the Cooling System’s Efficiency

Overheating can reduce your laptop’s performance and, if left unchecked, may lead to physical damage. Therefore, you must regularly monitor the effectiveness of its cooling system to ensure it properly regulates internal heat. An easy way to do this is to check the temperatures of key components like the CPU and GPU during demanding tasks.

Tools such as HWMonitor can help you monitor component temperatures. If they exceed safe ranges, your cooling system isn’t working well. To fix this, place your laptop on a hard surface rather than on a bed or couch, clean dust-covered exhaust vents, don’t overstress components, and use the laptop in a room with a moderate ambient temperature.

These common sense practices can keep your laptop cool under various conditions. If these measures don’t lower the temperatures, use a cooling pad and explore other options to reduce heat. You might miss critical issues if you don’t test your cooling system regularly, so performing checks during high-performance tasks is essential.

6. Execute a System Diagnostic Report

Running a System Diagnostic is a great way to assess your laptop’s health and performance. This test checks hardware and software configurations and tests your disk, network, CPU, drivers, RAM, and more. It then generates a report detailing the components working correctly and highlights any issues it detects.

In one test, you can assess hardware performance, uncover system configuration issues, and spot bottlenecks that require optimization. Such diagnostic reports provide a comprehensive overview and are valuable for pinpointing problem areas that might otherwise go unnoticed.

To generate a System Diagnostic report, type “Performance Monitor” and open the app. In the left sidebar, navigate to Data Collector Sets > System > System Diagnostics, and click the green play button in the top menu.

Wait a minute, expand the “Reports” category, go to “System,” expand the “System Diagnostics” menu, and open the latest generated report. Review the diagnostic results across all categories to spot issues with your laptop’s components or operating system settings and fix them accordingly. Regularly running these diagnostics can keep your laptop running smoothly and extend its usable life.

7. Review Your Laptop’s Reliability History

Our Windows laptops are reliable workhorses, but over time, problems can start to creep up. If we don’t address these issues early on, they can turn into expensive repairs or even lead to needing to replace the entire laptop. To keep your laptop running smoothly and extend its lifespan, it’s crucial to regularly monitor its hardware health. Here are several straightforward tips to help you ensure your laptop remains in optimal condition.

First, regularly clean your laptop’s vents and fans to prevent dust buildup that can cause overheating. Use compressed air to blow away dust and debris, and make sure the laptop is off and unplugged while you clean it.

Second, check the health of your hard drive or SSD. Utilize built-in tools like Windows’ CHKDSK or third-party software to scan for errors and fix them before they become serious issues.

Third, monitor your battery’s performance. Keep an eye on how quickly it drains and consider recalibrating it if needed. Replacement might be necessary if the battery’s performance significantly declines.

Lastly, update your system regularly. Software and firmware updates often include important patches that fix security vulnerabilities and system bugs, ensuring your laptop runs efficiently. By following these tips, you can keep your Windows laptop in great shape and avoid unexpected breakdowns.

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