Digital Home Thoughts: Sniff Out The Energy Hogs in Windows 7

I read about this tip in Maximum PC, tried it myself, and thought I'd share it with Digital Home Thoughts readers. It's pretty cool! This tip will tell Windows 7 to generate a power report, telling you which devices are mis-configured for optimal power savings.

To generate this report, here's what you do: first, click on the Start button, then type CMD. Right-click on the CMD program that will appear in the filtered list, and select Run As Administrator. A command-line box will appear. At the prompt, type in powercfg -energy. Wait 60 seconds, and Windows 7 will generate an HTML file called energy-report in the Systerm32 directory. Go find it and check out the results.

In my case, when I ran it on an HP Slimline computer purchased in 2007 and now running Windows 7, it tagged a bunch of USB devices that do not enter the Suspend State properly. What's curious is that when I go into Device Manager and check out the details for the USB Wireless adapter for instance, the check-box for "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" is checked. I suspect it's a driver issue - this was a Windows Vista-era computer, and while Windows 7 went on without a hitch, it's using generic Microsoft drivers rather than any that are from HP. I originally became interested in running this report because while this Slimline computer goes into sleep mode just fine, it has a habit of waking itself up for no reason - and I suspect a USB device is to blame. I've disabled the mouse and keyboard as devices that can wake the computer up from sleep, so we'll see how that goes...