Using a preview version of Windows 11 (or any operating system, for that matter) may get you to experience annoying or funny bugs. Some users have noticed that latest Dev builds of Windows 11 attempt to charge laptop batteries well beyond 100%. GlitchyDragon65 posted a screenshot on Reddit, revealing his battery indicator with a 115% charge level. Another user reported the same issue with a 104% charge level.
Of course, it is not like Windows 11 magically increases your laptop's battery capacity (it would be awesome, though). What users experience is a bug in the battery capacity reporting mechanism.
Microsoft is aware of the problem. Jen Gentleman, a Microsoft engineer, notified users that the company has already received several reports about battery indicators in Windows 11 going wild. She also explained that the issue is not exclusive to the latest Windows 11 Dev build.
There is no information on whether the bug harms device batteries in any way. We can only speculate (and hope) that it is a simple bug Microsoft will get rid of in future updates.
Meanwhile, here is another warning for all: Do not install pre-release software on mission-critical computers. If you want to test early Windows 11 updates but getting a separate machine is not an option, use virtualization software, such as VMWare Player.
Fortunately, the latter now allows creating a fully-compatible VMs that pass Windows 11 hardware requirements. One of the recent updates for VMWare Player made it possible to add software TPM and disable side-channel mitigations to improve the overall performance. The VirtualBox team is also working on a TPM passthrough driver, but there is no specific ETA from Oracle.
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