7

Windows 7 has a new power management debugging option built into powercfg.exe that can be used to expose potential power hogging drivers and configuration issues that could be eating away at your battery life and driving up your power bill.



As the description states, it is best to run while the system is idle, much like the WinSat "Windows Experience Index" process.

Running powercfg -energy, you end up with results like this:

Enabling tracing for 60 seconds...
Observing system behavior...
Analyzing trace data...
Analysis complete.

Energy efficiency problems were found.

21 Errors
17 Warnings
10 Informational

Using the default options, a file called energy-report.html will be created in the current directory from which powercfg.exe execute and gives you a snapshot of your system energy consumption over a 60 second period.

My laptop's report during idle was not particularly interesting, so here is an example of energy-report.html while my system was under light load with the usual devices I have plugged in my docking station. I seem to have many Suspend unfriendly USB devices.

Just a quick FYI which I expect to be resolved in future builds (post-PDC/etc), but for right now, networking of guest VMs in VMWare Workstation 6.5.0 and 6.5.1 is rather broken. I have some workarounds/hacks that I will document when I get a moment but they aren't pretty, but they at least get working networking.

There are also some issues with guest USB support, but considering W7 isn't even considered beta yet, the fact that this is the only piece of software I use everyday that doesn't work 100% correctly for me, compared to Vista, is pretty good.

Using a USB-over-network solution seems to work as a workaround for the USB issue - yes, I go to extraordinary lengths to self-host new operating systems, but it is worthwhile in the end.

If I had permission from my wife and kids, they would all be running W7 right now on their machines and we'd have a 100% W7 house. For now, it is just the machines I control.

If you are looking for Windows 7 Radeon drivers, go to ATI's site here. They work well so far from what I can tell. You can also modify them with Driver Heaven's Mobility Modder in case your mobile chipset isn't quite "officially" supported.

Considering the in-box driver in the recent builds of W7 dates back to 2006, it is nice to be able to take advantage of the newer display drivers.
Thankfully, there will be no radical driver support changes between Vista and W7, so Vista drivers should work with W7 without any changes.

I have yet to find a device that has a Vista driver that does not work under W7. With that said, I've finally been able to abandon the WIDCOMM/Broadcom Bluetooth stack for good and rely on the in-box Bluetooth stack. It is much improved. Ditto for HDMI/HDMI audio support.

Despite the lull in actual posts here lately, I have been generating some late night unique/original W7 articles to publish soon.