Improve Laptop Battery Performance in Windows 7

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I use Windows 7 on an ASUS Netbook that runs on a battery for 6-9 hours. One thing that always comes to my mind is why does my battery life fluctuate +-3 hours and how can I improve my netbook’s battery life and performance.

Well Windows 7 has just the right utility to provide that information. It’s called PowerCfg. Here’s how to use this utility.

Go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt. Right click > Run as administrator.

Type the following command powercfg –energy on the command prompt and hit enter. You will get a screen similar to the following screenshot:

Tip: It’s best to run this command when your system is in an idle state.

After 60 seconds, Windows creates an HTML file called ‘energy-report.html’ in C:\windows\system32. This report gives you an overview of your system’s energy efficiency over a 60 second period. Here are some screenshots of the report when I ran it on my netbook.

The report also give warnings of processes with significant processor utilization.

Read more about this utility in this whitepaper Using PowerCfg to Evaluate System Energy Efficiency

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About The Author

Suprotim Agarwal, Developer Technologies MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) is the founder and contributor for DevCurry, DotNetCurry and SQLServerCurry. He is the Chief Editor of a Developer Magazine called DNC Magazine. He has also authored two Books - 51 Recipes using jQuery with ASP.NET Controls. and The Absolutely Awesome jQuery CookBook.

Follow him on twitter @suprotimagarwal.