This is a let’s say lighter post, I came up while trying to compare battery life of my laptop and some buddies of mine. I wanted to know, how fast my battery depleted using different settings, use profile and power saving modes. Then I did some digging around Microsoft’s MSDN site, and I found some interesting WMI classes, that apparently provide a lot of “power related data”. I also wanted to have a way to log this data, and that’s how I ended up learning how to create a new event-log file and write data to it to use that as a log. So this is what I will try to show: get power related data and write it to the Event-Log.

“Energy” Related WMI Classes

Here are a few interesting classes I stumbled upon. Some of them are only available under Windows7 probably also Vista, but I’m not sure.

• WmiMonitorBrightness – gives information about monitor brightness. For example these line give the max. “value” and current value of brightness

$MaxBrightness = get-wmiobject -class WmiMonitorBrightness -Namespace root/wmi).level | measure-object -Maximum).maximum
$CrtBrightness = "{0:P0}" -f ((get-wmiobject -class WmiMonitorBrightness -Namespace root/wmi).CurrentBrightness/$MaxBrightness)

• Win32_PowerPlan – provides information and identifiers about the powerplans defined. In this class ALL powerplans are defined, and just the active plan has an “IsActive” flag attached it, here’s how to get it:

$powerplan = (Get-WmiObject -Class win32_powerplan -Namespace 'root/cimv2/power' | where {$_.IsActive -eq $true}).ElementName

• Win32_Processor – gets information about the CPU (I was interested in the CPU load for statistical purposes). This one was pretty easy to find, the value was written in plain sight. Take a look:

$cpu = (Get-WmiObject Win32_Processor).LoadPercentage

• Win32_Battery – Provides information about the battery itself (estimated time, remaining load, power status). Running “Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Battery | gm” take a closer look at these members:
  • BatteryStatus – this will toggle between ’1′ meaning on Battery and ’2′ meaning on AC Power
  • EstimatedRuntime – this will be the number of minutes running on battery, as the OS estimates it, and if you get a very high value (tens of thousands) when you plug the AC Power, it means the battery is charging
  • EstimatedChargeRemaining – percentage-wise representation of battery charge remaining

Powershell + Event-Log “101″

I used this battery and power experiment to learn more about working and writing data to the Event-Log. I wanted to create a new “Event-Log” in Windows (windows 7 as you probably know allows for a lot of application logs) and then write events to it. Then at any point you can export the Event-log to csv. The following creates an Event-Log, with the name “BatteryMonitor” from the Information category (for my uses “Source” was not needed but it is a required parameter:

New-EventLog -Source BattMon -LogName BatteryMonitor -CategoryResourceFile Information

You can also check if an Event-log is created exists you can use this scriptlet (the answer lies in WMI this time, I didn’t find a cmdlet that does it faster):

(get-wmiobject -class "Win32_NTEventlogFile" | where {$_.LogFileName -like 'BatteryMonitor'} | measure-object ).count -eq '1'

Finally here’s how to write to the event-log, a new event. This bit I used in a script to mark the execution of the script in the event-log:

Write-EventLog -LogName BatteryMonitor -Source BattMon -EventID 65533 -Message 'Starting new Execution of BatteryCharge Monitor Script. The script will pump here CSV values. Values are listed in this order, as CSV: PowerPlan,PowStatMsg,ChargeRemMsg,RemTimeMsg,RAM,CPU,CrtBrightness' -EntryType Information -ComputerName $env:computername -ErrorAction:SilentlyContinue

So that is about it, as usual I tried to tie all of these scriptlets into a usable script, you can download it from here.