Episode

Defrag Tools #159 - Powercfg

In this episode of Defrag Tools, Chad Beeder and Andrew Richards discuss the Powercfg command-line tool in Windows, which allows you to configure power management settings, and analyze power and battery usage.

Additional Resources:

Powercfg Command-Line Options

Timeline:

[00:00] Introductions and overview. Welcome back, Andrew!
[03:35] One facet of Powercfg is that it offers the command line equivalent of the Power Options GUI
[07:02] The /availablesleepstates shows the sleep state capabilities of your system
[08:08] You can enable/disable Hibernation (S4) with the /hibernate switch.
[09:27] The /devicequery switch is useful to tell you which devices on your system are capable of waking it from sleep. You can also use /deviceenablewake and /devicedisablewake to configure this.
[10:51] The /lastwake switch will tell you why your system woke up.
[12:50] /waketimers will tell you if any application has requested the system to wake up at a certain time.
[13:05] The /requests switch tells you if any application is preventing the system from going to sleep, keeping the screen on, etc. The /requestsoverride allows you to override this if necessary.
[16:11] The /batteryreport is a cool way to see the condition of your battery as well as recent usage history.
[19:45] The /energy switch will run a tracing session for a specified period of time and give you an idea of suspected energy configuration problems and top CPU users
[25:42] Questions? Email us at defragtools@microsoft.com