This article is about the mammal. For other uses, see Porcupine (disambiguation) . Porcupines are rodents with a coat of sharp spines, or quills, that protect against predators. The term covers two families of animals, the Old World porcupines and New World porcupines.
An average desktop computer uses between 60 and 300 watts. It is very difficult to know exactly how much computers use on average because there are so many different hardware configurations.
When I used Joulemeter's manual approach to estimate the energy consumed by two Windows 7 desktops and a Windows 8.1 laptop, the utility indicated that the desktops used about 75 watts an hour and the notebook about 25 watts an hour.