Improve Laptop Battery Performance in Windows 7

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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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