Cedric from NJ asks:
What’s a good way to check and improve the performance of my laptop? I feel like the battery drains way too fast and it’s practically brand new!
A very useful but unknown feature of Windows 7 is the built in tool to examine a laptop’s energy utilization and provide recommendation on how to improve and maximize battery life. This can be used by anyone with administrator access on a Windows 7 machine. Windows 7 will run a few tests to evaluate the performance of your laptop. The test results will be analyzed and a suitable HTML report will be generated. This report will provide recommendations on how to improve performance.
In order to use it, navigate to the command prompt by going to Windows -> Search Box -> Type “cmd” in the search box and when the Command Prompt appears in the search results, right-click it and select “Run as Administrator”.
Type the command given below to obtain an energy report
powercfg -energy -output \FilePath\Energy_Report.html
where FilePath represents the location where you want the HTML Report to be generated.
Guidelines
This test will analyze the system for common energy-efficiency and battery life problems and generate a HTML Report. This command should be used when the computer is idle and when no other programs/processes are running. Various optional parameters which can be used with this command are:
- OUTPUT : To provide the path of the output file
- XML : To provide an XML Report
- TRACE : To record trace files of system behavior in current path
- D : Used to specify trace file path name. Can only be used in conjunction with the TRACE command.
- DURATION : Specifies the number of seconds for which the system behavior is observed, default is 60 seconds.
Using this feature within Windows 7 will reduce the amount of additional diagnostic software which needs to be loaded on the laptop and thereby reduce the overheads / bloatware which is present in most branded laptops today. This will also provide a minor boost in performance.
Utilize this hidden feature in Windows 7 and maximize your laptop’s battery life today!
~Deepak Kannan
Great information, thanks a lot, you always show copasetic stuff.