How in the Tech

Determining your power efficiency in Windows 7

By Adam Myers ⋅ January 5, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Command Prompt, Windows 7

Microsoft introduced a number of new features in Windows 7 that you’ve likely come across yourself after a few hours in the new operating system. However, you may be interested in knowing that there were a number of changes and features introduced that aren’t readily apparent. With laptops slowly replacing the desktop as your main computing platform, as well as the dramatic rise in netbook computing, battery life is a major concern to every portable user. In Windows 7 it is possible to run a Power Efficiency Report that analyzes just how intelligent your system is with respect to power consumption, or ideally, lack thereof. With the results from the report you are armed with the information necessary to hopefully add a few more minutes of uptime to your laptop – as every little bit helps right?

To initiate the report you need to open a Command Prompt with Administrative Rights. From the Windows 7 Search box, search for cmd, right-click on the program and select Run as administrator.

In the command prompt run powercfg -energy

Windows will now collect and summarize an energy report after a minute or so. You can find the results in the directory from which you launched powercfg above, with the file name of energy-report.html

To view the report in your browser just execute energy-report.html in that same Command Prompt.

Items in pink are errors while yellow are warnings. Ideally you want to address as many of the issues as you can but it may be ultimately impossible to return a fully clean bill of power health.