Where Your Laptop's Power Really Goes

For Windows 7, we’ve added a new inbox utility that provides an HTML report of energy efficiency issues—a “Top 10” checklist of power problems. If you want to try it out on Windows 7, run powercfg /energy at an elevated command prompt. Be sure to close any open applications and documents before running powercfg—this utility is designed to find energy efficiency problems when the system is idle. powercfg with the /energy parameter can detect USB devices that are not suspending and applications that have increased the platform timer resolution.

For more advanced analysis, we have provided the Windows Performance Toolkit. The Performance Toolkit http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perftools.mspx makes it very easy for software developers to observe the resource utilization of their applications, resolve performance bottlenecks and identify issues impacting energy efficiency.

Interesting how almost 1/2 of energy goes to power the screen and only 9% to the processor (well 30% if you include the chipset). More interesting information on how Windows 7 is reducing energy usage in laptops in the article.

via Engineering Windows 7 via Lifehacker