Ages ago I measured how much power it took for the Start menu to open in Windows 7 on a Dell desktop that was fairly average at the time. In my somewhat crude measurement it was 20W for about 2 seconds.

Brilliant! Thanks for measuring this - I know it may be crude, but it’s also the best measurement I have ever heard of for this!

Assuming you like that kind of thing, maybe you can also test the power drain from displaying seconds in the taskbar in Windows 11. I know Raymond Chen posted an article about it, but I’d be interested whether you can spot a difference. If it really is on the order of 5 mW, then I assume you can’t detect it.

One of the downsides of only using a laptop is that you can’t see this level of detail because the battery acts as a buffer.

Imagine what the draw is for opening some bloated electron monstrosity like Teams or Discord these days.