Summary
- Windows 11 is adding a battery percentage indicator to the taskbar.
- A code from a Windows 11 build reveals upcoming battery icon updates.
- To enable the feature, download the Insider build and Vivetool or wait for a Stable release.
When you’re using Windows 11 on a laptop and want to check how much juice you have left in the battery, how do you do it? For the longest time, I’ve had to mouse over the little battery icon in the taskbar, which is odd, given how, ideally, I should know just by looking at the indicator itself. Well, today is my (and your) lucky day because Microsoft is finally—finally!—adding a little percentage to the battery indicator so you can see how much is left. Took them long enough.
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Microsoft is working on a percentage battery indicator on Windows 11
This fantastic news was brought to us by PhantomOfEarth on X. When a new Windows build arrives, it usually includes new features that are still being worked on and are thus hidden by default while Microsoft fleshes it out. PhantomOfEarth does an excellent job of cracking open new Windows builds and finding these hidden nuggets so we can see what the company is working on.
In the newest build, PhantomOfEarth managed to find some good news for people who like using Windows 11 on the go:
If you want to see it yourself, grab the Windows 11 Insider build and Vivetool. Once you have them both downloaded, open Vivetool, run the command “vivetool /enable /id:48822452,” then reboot. If it’s still not working, do the same thing, but replace the numbers with 48433719 instead. If you’d rather not do all that, you can wait for Microsoft to either make the feature visible on the Insider build or release it on the Stable channel.
PhantomOfEarth notes that performing these steps will activate hidden features introduced in prior builds. For example, the battery icon will turn orange when in Power Saver mode and green when charging. Regardless, I’m happy that Microsoft is finally doing something with the borderline-useless battery icon.
