Is your computer’s power profile optimized?

Have you been getting a low battery back time on your laptop lately? Do you know whether the battery is completely worn out and needs replacement? Or is it some power hungry programs and setting that is killing your batter backup time?

Off late I had problems with my battery back up time and I decided to do some research on this. I came across several articles and small utilities that is helpful to make the decision process easier for you. It turns out that the modern day batteries come up sensors capturing a lot of detail including the wear level and you need only some program to read it. If you are running Windows 7 on your laptop you have good news. Windows 7 comes with a “Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report” in the OS itself.

Here’s how to create a detailed report.

Type cmd in the search box to launch the command-line program.

Right click on it and click Run as Administrator

At the command prompt, type powercfg –energy and press enter

You can see the message “Enabling tracing for 60 seconds”

At the end of this tracing you will receive a brief listing of the the energy efficiency problems found on your computer. But it won’t be detailed. However it also creates a more detailed report in a file named “energy-report.html”. You can find the path to this file in the command's output. The detailed report will provide you enough details to decide whether you need to change the battery or make some adjustments to your power settings. For example, in my case I learned that my battery has work out 44% and hence it recharged only to the 56% of its designed capacity. You can find this out by going to the Battery Information section of the report. The report is a bit technical and is recommended only for advanced users.

For better management of your battery, I recommend using a small utility called BatteryCare. Its is a software created to optimize the usage and performance of the modern laptop's battery. It monitors the battery's discharge cycles and helps improving its lifetime. The features include monitoring of discharge cycles, automatic switching of power plans, control over windows services during battery power and CPU/HDD temperature reading. 

You can find more details about it at BatteryCare website. It is definitely worth checking out.