Ever wanted to check you computer's power consumption? Me too!
In this short article I'll present you a rather simple but really useful software that will enable you to monitor your laptop's power consumption. This software is simply called Joulemeter.

What is Joulemeter?

If you have a slight background in electronics, you must know what this word refers to. For people who skipped electronics class, joulemeter stands for the name of the device that lets us measure the electrical energy in joules.
But you're not here to learn about the device, we'll be rather using a sweet piece of software kindly made by Microsoft. Sadly, the download link is not available anymore, so I'm going to provide you this alternative link below. You can still google it if you need.

Download Joulemeter from uptodown

Once downloaded and installed, click your start menu and look for Joulemeter, you'll find "Joulemeter Taskbar" and "Joulemeter Calibration". Choose Joulemeter Taskbar and check your taskbar if you see an icon like the screenshot below.

If you can't find the highlighted icon, start Joulemeter Calibration then proceed to start Joulemeter Taskbar.
Note that the software is very experimental, it might not work. I advice you to keep your expectations low in any case.

Exploring the interface of Joulemeter software

Below is a screenshot of Joulemeter's main Statistics graphical interface.

Note that it might differ following your software. In any case, the interface is really straightforward. It's divided in two sections. The first highlighting the power consumption broken down following your laptop's components. The second contains more nerdy stats.
Oddly enough, Joulemeter does not seem to detect my graphics card consumption.

There are two other tabs. The "About" tab gives you some background info about the project. And the "Instructions" tab gives you more information about how to setup the software in case it seems not working as expected.

Conclusion

That's all! I hope this little piece of utility was helpful. For me personally, I was kind of surprised to learn that my monitor was consuming around 10,55 W on its own. What about you? What's your stats? Did it work as expected? Is this utility useful for you?
You can follow me if you want to discover more useful utilities like this one, I'll try to post regularly about useful software utilities.

Till the next article, stay curious.