I have been using the Release Candidate of Windows 7 since it came out. Every day I try to poke around and find out what is new.
I found an interesting tool for finding programs and settings that eat away at your laptop battery life.
It is available as a new command line option of the powercfg.exe program – Which has been part of windows since XP.
You call it from the command line like this:
powercfg -energy
(Make sure your command prompt is elevated as administrator)
When you run it, the program will do testing for 60 seconds:
Once it is finished, it will create a report in html format. It will show the programs and devices that are contributing to shorter battery life:
Once you have the report, you can go through and try to correct the issues. Obviously there are going to be things that you can’t do anything about – Like a laptop motherboard that does not support the latest in power management.
Still, you will be able to fix some of them – and that will help you get just a little bit more out of your laptop battery in Windows 7.