Last month, we talked about how Microsoft and Intel engineers worked on improving laptop battery life with Windows 7. Beyond simply improving the efficiency of the Operating System, Microsoft has also introduced energy-saving applications.
One of the cool new features of Windows 7 is the Energy Efficiency Report. Basically, this will find out what’s eating up your laptop battery power and analyze the efficiency of your computer.
How do you run this report? Just follow these steps:
- Go to your start menu, type in “cmd” and right-click on the Command Prompt result to “Run as Administrator.”
- From there, type in “powercfg -ENERGY“.
- Your computer will run a report, which you can access by typing “energy-report.html” and you’ll see all the efficiencies and settings changes that Microsoft recommended implementing in your browser.
In this report, all the items in pink are Errors, items in yellow are Warnings, and white items are Informational. You can go through these items and correct as many issues as you can.
This excellent report is only available in Windows 7 and can significantly extend your battery lifetime. If there is something in the report you don’t understand, Microsoft provides documentation on their website.
So, if you are having problems with laptop battery life or just want to get some more run time, give the power efficiency report a whirl!
Note: Some builds on Windows 7 can have difficulty opening the energy-report.html file. You should be able to fix this by copying the file from the C:\Windows\System32 folder to another location (your desktop, for example).
