Generate SleepStudy Report in Windows 10

Last Updated on February 25, 2024 by Mathew Diekhake

Sleep Study tells you how well the system slept and how much activity it experienced during that time. While in the sleep state, the system is still doing some work, albeit at a lower frequency. Because the resulting battery drain is not easily perceptible (you can’t see it draining), we built the Sleep Study tool in Windows 8.1 to allow you to track what is happening. We thought of simply using traditional logging to do this, but ironically, the logging itself would drain the battery. With this in mind, we designed the Sleep Study tool to minimize its own impact on battery life, while tracking the battery draining activities.

You can use Sleep Study to see which apps and devices are most active during a sleep session. Sleep Study reviews all the sleep sessions longer than 10 minutes and provides you with a report that color codes each session according to its power consumption. A session is defined as the period from Screen Off to Screen On. In cases when the system is plugged into AC power, the policies are less stringent than when on battery power. While the tool still tracks connected standby activity on AC power, it is more useful to identify unexpected drains on battery, or DC power.

Starting with Windows 8.1, a software tool, SleepStudy, became available as an inbox component in all Windows PCs that implement the modern standby power model. SleepStudy can measure modern standby performance with minimal impact. Read more: Modern standby SleepStudy

The SleepStudy report is organized as a series of modern standby sessions. A modern standby session is defined as one instance of the screen turning off and then back on again. Read more: Modern standby SleepStudy report

The following tutorial demonstrates how to generate a SleepStudy report when you’re using a version of the Windows 10 operating system.

How to Generate Sleep Study Report in Windows 10

Here is how you can generate a SleepStudy report from the elevated version of the Command Prompt window in Windows 10:

1. Open the elevated Command Prompt window.

2. Type one of the following commands, depending on the one you want to use, and then press the Enter key on your keyboard to execute it. (click to enlarge screenshot below)

For .html file with default 3 day duration:

powercfg /SleepStudy /output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\sleepstudy-report.html

For .html file with specified duration:

powercfg /SleepStudy /output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\sleepstudy-report.html /Duration days

For .xml file with default 3 day duration:

powercfg /SleepStudy /output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\sleepstudy-report.xml /XML

For .xml file with specified duration:

powercfg /SleepStudy /output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\sleepstudy-report.xml /XML /Duration days

Note: Change where it says “days” in the line of code for the actual number of days (ranging from 1 to 14) that you would like to generate the report for.

3. The SleepStudy report automatically saves to the desktop.

The SleepStudy report now looks different than it did in earlier versions of Windows 10. Instead of having machine information, battery drain chart, connected standby session summary table, so forth, you now get system power state transitions, a graph of the start times and durations, analysis results, and installed batteries.