Component-wise energy breakdown of laptop

People's Choice Award winner at the 6th Annual Symposium on Graduate Research and Scholarly Projects (GRASP) held at the Hughes Metropolitan Complex, Wichita State University, April 23, 2010.In the modern age, there is an exponential growth in the usage of laptops for computing and communication. However, the battery life of laptops is only a few hours at best. Further, studies indicate that laptops have a stake of approximately one percent in the overall global energy consumption. Thus, there are significant incentives to minimize energy consumed by laptops. To achieve this goal, it is important to understand the energy consumed by each component of a laptop. In this work, we systematically studied the power consumed by each component of a modern laptop. Our results indicate that wireless communication is a significant consumer of power along with obvious power hogs like the Display, Graphics card and the Processor