There is a definate current need to assess our energy use, from EU initiatives and global warming, right down to the pennies (pounds more like) spent on the electric bill. You may think that this is a small matter, but I have personally implemented energy saving tactics into large and small sized businesses and seen a massive effect.

And it doesn't stop there either. If you use laptops, or have out in the field agents using laptops - the energy usage has a direct effect on battery life too. Extend the battery life and you extend your workforce's working ability and cut costs on purchasing secondary batteries.

But how do you find out what your PC is using and tackle these issues?

With MS Windows 7, you can use a small applet called 'The Power Config Utility'. It can be run directly from the command line using the correct switch, it creates a file (detailed) that thoroughly examines power usage on your machine.

Read on to find out how it works...

Creating a report

To create your spanky new energy report, you will need to give Windows a set of instructions - these have to be at Administrator level too. Click start > and type 'cmd' into the search box.

The first application should be the command line executable file called 'cmd.exe'. Right click it, you will now be shown an additional menu where you can select to run the command line app in administrator mode 'Run as administrator'. You will obviously need to know the admin password for this to work.

Once launched though, you will have the following box in front of you:

Type the following command and press enter:

powercfg -energy

It can take anything from 30 seconds to 2 minutes depending on you machine to generate the report.

Wait as it interegates the system...

And creates the report...Once done (as above) type 'exit' and press enter to close the box.

Open Windows Explorer and navigate to Windows > System32 > and look for the file named 'energy-report.html'.

On opening the report, you will find it broken down into Errors, warnings, and information. For example you can see from the example below that we have altered the power settings to prevent display dimming. The report suggests we switch to a different setting to save power.

Generating these reports will give you a great starting point and highlight instantly changeable settings in one go. And all the help we can get is well deserved, especially in the current climate.

Thanks to all 3rd party sources such as MS TechNet, MS and TechRepublic.