Is there a program like powertop (LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux) on Windows?
I have been trying to optimize the battery life of my laptop, and want to compare the power consumption to Windows (I still have the factory installed Vista).
The feature I am looking for is a simple power consumption (in Watts) reading. For powertop, it's averaged over the last 15 seconds. I am guessing it uses the battery charge level to calculate power consumption, since it only gives the reading when the laptop is running on battery power.
On my laptop (with a ULV Core 2 Solo and LED backlight), I am able to get down to ~9W (for the whole system!), with 50% brightness and wifi on, surfing, which I thought was pretty amazing. It's interesting to see how much or how little everything matters (turning on wifi power saving mode saves ~2W, turning off bluetooth doesn't change anything, 100% brightness to 0% brightness saves 2.7W, turning off wifi vs wifi in power saving mode doesn't matter, running a busy-loop increases power consumption by 1.1W, turning off the laptop LCD vs 0% brightness saves 1.6W). Some of the results are quite surprising to me. I didn't expect the wifi power save mode would matter that much, and I thought brightness and CPU load would affect the power consumption more. I didn't test anything to do with the harddrive since I have a SSD.
So yeah, anything that can give me this number in Windows?
