Date: 2012dec7 OS: Linux Q. How can I see how much power by computer is using? A. Put a Kill-a-Watt (or similar device) between your PC and the wall. But then it depends on what the computer is doing. On my box it used 54W when resting and more when doing other intense things.

(resting) 54W

# Infinite loop while true; do 78W done

# Infinite loop with heavy disk access while true; do 78W ls -lR / done

# And the winner, copying random data cat /dev/urandom > /dev/null 82W