Power consumption

Hi. I used to have an HP notebook and it had a HP power management program which let me see how many watts my laptop was consuming. I no longer have HP i have dell and i dont see any similar program. Is there anything else i can install? The HP one wont install propably because i have a dell.

 

You can use Battery Bar, Battery Care or ThrottleStop..

 

Throttlestop only shows the consumption of the CPU. The other programs only showed the discharge rate of the battery. The hp program would show me how much i was consuming with the AC on even without battery.

 

I wouldn't bother looking. I've seen the HP software you're on about, and it was never very accurate. Plug your laptop power supply into a plug-through power monitor and you see the figures the HP software quoting were never a reflection of reality. That may be why other manufacturers don't seem to have included the feature.

 

Throttlestop shows the battery discharge rate, just as BatteryBar or BattStat does. Unless you have a kill-a-watt meter, it's the most accurate measure you can get. Just ensure your DC power profile matches your AC one if you want to find what your peak power usage is when running AC.

 

Give Joulemeter a try

cheers ...

 

Trying Joulemeter now... doesn't seem to be very accurate either...

 

What / how do you base this information from?

cheers ...

 

Does that statement mean that you already know the consumption and therefore know the program is reporting wrong? If that's the case, why don't you just use the number you know is right?

 

Use CPUID Hardware Monitor. Or Calculate it manually iff you have 2 off these current values (ie. 54868 mWh = 4400 mAh * 12.47 V).
Formula: Power (mWh)= Current (mAh) * Current Voltage (V)

Incase you don't know battery drains are not linear.
It is some sort of like this as it is their nature:

 

Note: I'm not the original poster.

I base this information on having a rather nifty power monitor system I can plug any device into and get a reading of the volts, amps, and watts, in real time or averaged over the time the unit has been running.

Yes, it means exactly that. Again I'm not the original poster. I often get asked for software that can do the above, so in my case I do use the hardware monitor, but I'm on the lookout for something that could be used by others. I've yet to find it.

 

Nothing to do with the OP, I just quoted and replied direct to you. Maybe you can describe in detail this nifty tool of yours for OP and for us all to try?

cheers ...

 

Right. More accurate dims. Thanks for the correction

 

This is the closest to what I have, and what I'm currently recommending...
Ningbo KML Electrical Co.,Ltd.

I made mine from a circuit supplied to me, as at the time, units like that were not readily available cheaply. Consequently, mine has USB connectivity to read data, and a 16x4 line LCD matrix screen, and it a fair bit more bulky.

 

Very nice tool and I think I am gonna buy one similar for different purposes.
Thanks

 

Unless the laptop has an ADC for current and voltage not much you can do other than place meters, preferably on the DC side to measure power.

Running on battery it is possible the current and voltage can be read via software using the EC or maybe SMBus but with so many different implementations it can be difficult to have something that works for different makes of laptop. I use to use this way to measure power on my own laptop. In this example the current is negative because the battery is discharging, ie running on battery power.



HWinfo32 was doing something along the lines of reading EC data a while back. Don't know how far it's progressed since then.

 

Here's some American versions: Newegg.com - kill a watt

 

No idea about the other two mentioned by Indrek, but the Kill-a-watt I saw can be +/-5Watt (Yes, it can say 5W with nothing plugged in, worse case scenario) so wasn't that accurate for lower power devices. They may well have improved it in the last year or so, but it's more designed for measuring household appliances.