[holmes4]

While I was at the recent Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, I attended a talk on Windows 7 optimizations for power efficiency. You can get the slides by going here, entering "Windows 7" in the "Search for items containing" box and clicking Search. When the session is displayed, click on the PDF icon to the left to download the slides. (I could not find a direct link.)

The first half of the session was about hardware design, the second about Windows 7 changes. One neat thing is the addition of an energy management analysis tool in Win7. To run it, open a command prompt window (I think it needs to be run as administrator), cd to a convenient location, and type:

powercfg -energy -output report.html

Before doing this, you should close all open programs and try to get the system into an idle state, By default, it will monitor the system for 60 seconds and then produce a report in the named file (report.html here).

Some of the things it will tell you:

• USB devices that did not appear to honor suspend states
• Processes using significant CPU
• Whether the system timer resolution was changed from the default
• What power policies are in effect
• What the power management capabilities of the system are

Some of these things you may not be able to do anything about, but perhaps some you can. If nothing else, it is a good way to see what is running when your system is "idle".

When I ran this on my Mini 9, it reported some USB devices as not going into suspend, but I have no trouble suspending my system.

[bmcclure937]

That is a nifty utility