Episode

Defrag Tools #181 - System Power Report

In this episode of Defrag Tools, Chad Beeder and Andrew Richards are joined by Paresh Maisuria from the Windows Kernel Power team and Zach Holmes from the Fundamentals team to talk about System Power Report, a new feature in Windows 10 Creators Update.

Related links: Defrag Tools #168 - Powercfg Sleep Study (older version of this tool)
Defrag Tools #157 - Energy Estimation Engine (E3) (the framework used for estimating power usage)

Timeline:

[00:00] Welcome and introductions
[00:30] This is an updated and expanded version of a feature previously called Sleep Study. Now it covers everything related to power, not just details of modern standby states.
[02:55] You can still run it with powercfg /sleepstudy (for backwards compatibility) - but the new command is powercfg /systempowerreport, or powercfg /spr
[04:08] Opening up the generated report - lots more data than in the old Sleep Study report.
[05:32] Looking an active session: How much battery power was used, and by what? What was the screen brightness? Which apps used the most power?
[09:40] Why some power usage gets attributed to "Unknown"
[15:00] Unlike the old Sleep Study report, the System Power Report even gives useful info on traditional standby (S3) systems.
[16:40] Looking at a standby session: You can tell why a system went into standby, and why it woke up. Also lots of other stats, like how long it took to hibernate, etc.
[20:27] The report also contains an "expert tab" which contains data about the battery design capacity, current capacity, and health
[23:18] Bugchecks are also logged in the report (including the parameters).
[24:35] Still has all the details on a modern standby system (like in the old Sleep Study report). But enhanced. Now we have better instrumentation to track why a system got woken from standby.
[27:58] Of interest to OEMs and hardware engineers: We track power usage data for the SoC (System on a Chip) subsystems. Can give you the first indication of where to look further if power usage is too high.

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