Analyzing your Windows 7 Notebook Battery Performance

One of the many nice features of Windows 7 is its increased energy efficiency. (Anything that lets me finish a movie on a long flight is goodness!) What I didn’t know until now is that you can actually generate a report that outlines your exact power usage and how to improve it (though somewhat cryptically).

Just run

powercfg -energy -output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\Energy_Report.html

from an elevated command prompt (I created a batch file, then a shortcut to it with the Run As Administrator option checked). It will run for 60 seconds, then drop a very detailed energy report on your desktop in HTML format. 

I haven’t analyzed the report other than to see that I’m burning electrons at a good rate. But it’s on purpose as I’m running in high performance profile at the moment. Thanks to http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/4569-power-efficiency-diagnostics-report.html for this tip! For more information on Windows 7 energy efficiency, please see

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/06/windows-7-energy-efficiency.aspx

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