Today, there is an exponential growth in the use of laptops for computing and communication. However, the battery life of laptops is only a few hours, at best. Furthermore, studies indicate that laptops contribute to approximately 1% of the overall global energy consumption. Thus, there are significant incentives to minimize the energy consumed by laptops. To achieve this goal, it is important to understand the energy expended by each component of a laptop. Initially in this work, the power consumed by each component of a modern laptop was systematically studied. Results indicate that wireless communication has been a significant consumer of power, particularly obvious power hogs being the display, graphics card, and processor. A subsequent study of energy consumption of portable devices using a remote cloud application compared to local execution revealed some interesting facts.