Generate an energy report on your Windows 7

All of us have huge power bills and would like to cut it down any way we can, and the computer seems the first thing to alter. The thing you would need to do is to generate an energy report on your Windows 7, from there it is pretty much smooth sailing as far as energy saving is concerned. Conversely, this is also an effective way to devise strategies to extend the battery life of laptops using Windows 7.

Firstly we need to know what exactly a energy report is and what it does. An energy report is essentially a diagnostics action which analyses the power efficiency of your computer. It also reports on any battery life problems, any errors or warnings and a lot of informational details. One strong caution, though, you should be sure that your computer is idle, no other programs should be running, not even documents. At best it might slow down the process of generating an energy report, at worst it might affect your programs.

If an energy efficient computer running on the most advanced operating system available, then you ought to generate an energy report on your Windows 7. You can generate an energy report on your Windows 7 to make your computer more energy efficient and to reduce energy consumption.

Here is the simplest way to:

1. Open an elevated command prompt window. To do this just click on Start Menu, type cmd in the search box. a cmd.exe would appear in the list. Right-click on this in the list and select Run as administrator (this is very important as if you are not running it as administrator many features may get blocked).
2. In this command prompt window (shown in the diagram below), type the following command and press Enter: powercfg -energy

3. The beauty of Windows 7 is that here it will not only observe the energy consumption behaviour of your computer for 60 seconds, but thereafter give you detailed report on it. After the 60 seconds are up, it will tell you how many error, warnings and informationals it finds. Then it will (here is where it becomes really useful) tell you that it has generated a report and you can open it from C:\Windows\System32\energy-report.html.

4. But wait! There is more. Type this command in the same command prompt window and hit Enter to open the report file directly from where you are:

start %windir%\System32\energy-report.html

5. Now Windows will generate an energy report on your Windows 7 which will look something like this:

Each error is a waste of energy, do it is wise to deal with every single one. You can have a look at each of the errors and try to find a solution for each of them to reduce your overall power consumption. But don’t be disheartened if the error message stays on after you fix the problem. You need to generate an energy report on your Windows 7 again to see your handiwork fulfilled.

Category: Windows