How to Run a Power Efficiency Report in Windows 7

Posted on November 17, 2009 at 5:47 am

Windows 7 has some pretty cool new features and one of those is the energy efficiency report. What’s that you ask? It basically lets you find out what is eating up all your battery power and analyze the efficiency of your computer.

So how can you run this report? Well, first you need to make sure you run it when your computer is idle and you have exited all programs. Now start an elevated command prompt in Windows 7.

You can do this by clicking on Start, then typing command prompt into the search box and right-clicking on Command Prompt and choosing Run As Administrator.

windows 7 energy report

Now type the following command at the prompt:

powercfg –energy

Now your computer will be evaluated over 60 seconds. At the end, you’ll see a message indicating how many errors were found, warnings, and just informational notes.

powercfg energy

Now type in the following command to view the HTML report that was generated:

energy-report.html

You will now see a report that looks like this in Internet Explorer:

power efficiency report windows 7

All the items in pink are Errors, all the items in yellow are Warnings, and white is just informational. You should go through all of the errors and warnings and try to rectify as many issues as you can.

This is an excellent report that is only available in Windows 7 which can significantly extend your battery lifetime if you fix all the problems. If you don’t understand something in the report, you can check out the official documentation from Microsoft no evaluating system energy efficiency.

So if you are having power problems in Windows 7 or poor battery life, make sure to run the power efficiency report first! Enjoy!

» Filed Under Windows 7

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Comments

7 Responses to “How to Run a Power Efficiency Report in Windows 7”

  1. Greg said on : November 17th, 2009 at 10:31 am

    This is almost exactly like powertop for Linux. A very useful tool I’ll be running right away – thanks for sharing!


  2. Michael said on : November 17th, 2009 at 10:54 am

    Ran cmd.exe as admin in Windows7 x64 Build 7100 and it says it generated the file but…

    Error 6 (net::ERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND): The file or directory could not be found.


  3. akishore said on : November 17th, 2009 at 11:21 am

    Hey Michael, I had this same problem also actually, but just thought it was my computer. For some reason, the security on the System32 folder is so tight that you can’t even open files there.

    What I had to do was go into C:\Windows\System32 and then copy the file onto my desktop and then it opened fine. Not sure why the command prompt defaulted to C:\Windows\System32 in the first place!


  4. Bill said on : November 17th, 2009 at 11:35 am

    Michael – I had the same problem. Find the file in Win32 , copy and paste it to desktop or another (non-windows) directory, and then open it. Fixed the problem for me.


  5. Desmond said on : November 17th, 2009 at 11:41 am

    I had the same problem running Windows 7 x64. I changed my directory to my Documents folder instead of the system32 folder and it created the file.


  6. Rick said on : February 10th, 2010 at 11:18 am

    Do not input C:\windows\system32\energy-report.html in the run field. I tried this to view the report and instead of the report opening up, Windows shut down (not a reboot).

    Nice tool, but Windows 7 is turning out to be worse than XP.


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  1. Power Efficiency Reports Tune Up Windows 7’s Energy Use | Lifehacker Australia Says:

    [...] How to Run a Power Efficiency Report in Windows 7 [Online Tech Tips] Tagged:command lineenergywindowswindows 7 [...]

    November 17th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
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