Home technology Windows 8.1 Sleep Study

Windows 8.1 Sleep Study

by Eric Kraus

Surface Pro 3

I recently purchased a Surface Pro 3 and have to say – I absolutely love it.  The marketing is spot on with this device, it truly is a laptop and tablet in one.  I am particularly impress with the battery life.  Last week, I did a few battery tests with very pleasing results.  The first test was with brightness at 100%.  I carried on a normal day of emails, Yammer posts, conference calls while writing notes, etc.  At 100%, I was able to work 5 hours before I needed to find some power.  The second test was with brightness at about 50%.  You may think 50% is pretty dark, but I was happy with the brightness and able to see just fine (after a little while I had forgotten that I was working under reduce brightness).  With the same type of ‘work’ activities on the device at 50%, I was able to work 7.5 hours before hitting the 5% critical mark.  During this second test, I actually worked the entire day without plugging the device in.  Awesome.

I won’t do a full review of the device since there are plenty of place you can read in depth evaluations…however, I will say that this really is a great work and personal device.

InstantGo

I wanted to share an interesting feature of Windows 8 that I found recently.  Related to the great battery life above, Windows 8 added a feature called ‘Connected Standby’ which is now ‘InstantGo’ in Windows 8.1.  You can read more about InstantGo here: http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/windowsexperience/archive/2014/06/19/instantgo-a-better-way-to-sleep.aspx

Sleep Study

PCs that have Windows 8.1 and compatible hardware, also have a cool new feature called ‘Sleep Study’.  It’s a logging mechanism that monitors the battery drain during sleep.  You can then analyze what hardware components are causing wake/sleep drain of the battery.

Enabling Sleep Study

Enabling Sleep Study is easy.  Just fire up a command prompt with Administrative privileges

CommandPromptLaunch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once you have the command prompt open, type powercfg /sleepstudy

 

CommandPromptResults

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your report will be created in a temporary location like C:\windows\system32\sleepstudy-report.html

Copy that file to the desktop (or different location other than C:\windows\system32 directory)

Open the file in Internet Explorer

 

Report

 

 

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