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Powercfg and Power Efficiency Diagnostics Reports

One of the new command tools introduced in Windows Vista was powercfg. Essentially it’s a command line tool that enables users to control power settings. There are a lot of very granular setting that can be configured. To get an idea of what you can do with it just run the following command from the command line:

powercfg –Help | more

You’ll need to pipe that help output to a “more” because the standard command prompt settings won’t buffer the entire help output!

A really cool new feature for Windows 7 is the Power Efficiency Diagnostic Reports. This will allow power users and administrators understand and optimize their systems for maximum power efficiency and by virtue maximum battery life for laptops. In large environments the cumulative effect of optimizing power usage over thousands of computers can result in tangible power and money savings!

To generate the power Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report open an administrative command prompt and run:

powercfg -energy

The system will observe the behaviour of your devices and settings for 60 seconds. Once complete the following output will be generated:

The output file is dropped into the current working directory. Open the report in IE to get a detailed list of the information. Also keep in mind that the PowerProfile you’re using will have an impact on the report.

Notice that the errors in the above screenshot are all related to the fact that I have set High Performance enable while on battery. Some may not agree that it is an “error” but the thing to keep in mind is that this is in the context of creating maximum power efficiency. When I change my power profile to one that uses speed step and lowers the performance on my laptop this error will resolve and go if I run the report again.

Some other errors that can be generated relate to drivers or peripherals that won’t enter a low power mode. If you ever dealt with a laptop that won’t sleep a bad driver that doesn’t support advanced power management can often be the problem. This report can help isolate these issues.

Near the bottom of the report is information about CPU utilization, processes, and this little gem (screen shot above) This report can help troubleshoot battery usage and charge capacity. This gives admin’s a great way to decide when a battery should be replaced. If the last full charge is consistently dropping from the design capacity it may be time to replace the battery.

With this report Admins can tweak power profiles to realize the maximum benefits of new power efficient computer platforms. Happy efficient computing!