How to reduce Power consumption??

Everyone looks for finding ways to reduce power consumption while using their electronic appliances. In this article I will focus on finding ways for monitoring power consumption of your computer/laptop and let you know the ways by using which you can reduce the power consumption. Excessive power consumption affects the life of your computer setup and also the battery life in case of laptop. Windows operating system including Windows 8, Windows 7, Window Vista, and Windows XP  has leverages us to evaluate the power consumption of computer through ‘PowerCfg’ command in the Command prompt. You will also get an HTML version of the current status of power consumption of your computer. Pre requisite for generation of Power consumption evaluation report:

·         You must logon as Administrator or know the Administrator password for performing the required task.

For generating power evaluation report on your computer you have to follow the following steps:

·         Click on the Start button, and then select All Programs from the right pane of the Start menu.

·         Click on the Accessories and then make a right click on Command Prompt.

·         Select Run as Administrator, then a black screen also known as command line interface appears on your screen.

·         For generating a power consumption evaluation report you have to type “powercfg –energy” (without quotes) and press Enter key.

·          You have to wait for 1 minutes or 60 seconds and during this period CPU will monitor the current status of power consumption and after complete analysis list the number of errors, warnings and information.

·         An HTML version of this power consumption evaluation report is saved in the computer. You can get access to this computer and analyze it. The report is named as energy-report.html and you can get access through the following path:

My Computer\c:\Windows\System32\ energy-report.html

Report Analysis:

This report is divided into four parts:

1.      General Information: First partition of the report contains the basic information regarding your computer setup. It contains information like Computer name, Computer manufacturer, BIOS, BIOS build version, product name etc.

2.      Errors: Second partition contains the red background which contains information under error heading. This portion will list the activities which are affecting the power consumption and battery life of the computer. The problems listed under this category affect 15% or more battery life of computer.

3.      Warnings: Third partition of this report contains information with yellow background under Warnings heading. This contains the information about the hardware and software which are consuming more power as usual. You can try to fix them through hardware power management available option in the control panel.

4.      Information: Last partition of white background which contain information about the system components that are inspected during the test. They don’t contain information about any specific hardware which is consuming excessive power.

Precautionary measures for reducing Power Consumption:

·         It is always advised to put your computer in Sleep mode or Hibernate mode to reduce power consumption.

·         Now with the advancement in technology we have new features like ZPOD which blocks the power flow to the CDROM when not in use. It contains the electromechanical head which is responsible for reading/writing data on the CD/DVD and consumes lots of power. So Windows 8 provides a special feature ZPOD which restrict the power flow to the CD/DVD ROM and thus reduces power consumption.

·         In latest Windows operating system like Windows 8, Windows 7 a special option is designed in control panel for power management. Three modes of operation are provided: Power saver, Balanced and High Performance. It is recommended to use Balanced mode but you can use any of them according to your need. 

·         You can also create Custom Power management plan according to your need through the Control Panel. You can adjust Sleep or Hibernate timing, suspend USB operation, Change processor working mode to minimum processor state and can select Hybrid state for your computer.

So by following the above precautionary measures you can reduce the power consumption and extend the life of your computer. You can also use some of the computer maintenance tools which constantly monitor power consumption of your computer and suggest the ways to control it.