Help save the planet by reducing your PC's carbon footprint

The human race drains the earth of its natural resources every second of the day. If things don’t improve, we’ll eventually have nothing left to burn. We’re not powerless to help, though, and we can easily reduce our carbon footprint by optimising the way we use our PCs. As an added benefit, it will also lower your electricity bills, which is welcome news in these economically uncertain times.

Windows Vista already comes with power-saving features, but as research undertaken by Climate Savers has uncovered - a massive 90 per cent of people turn it off altogether. The result of this is that we use more energy to keep the wheels turning on our PCs, and we pump out a lot more CO2 into the atmosphere - which increases the damage to the environment.

There is an alternative, though, which could help to encourage people to lower their energy usage. Verdiem, a company that’s already helped to save companies £20M with its corporate power management software, has just released a free version for the consumer called Edison. It promises to make saving energy on your PC easier than ever, and to make us aware of the impact that we’re having on the environment when our computers are switched on all the time.

Allison Cornia, VP of Product Management at Verdiem, the company behind the creation of Edison, tells us why we should consider using it. “Edison compliments what’s already on your PC, but does so in a much less complex fashion. The power-saving feature in Windows Vista has 16 different settings, and it’s this complexity that makes people turn off power saving altogether.”

Edison is very easy to use. It sits in your Taskbar so you have instant access to it, and it takes just a few seconds to customise it to your needs. By adjusting the slider, you can choose to save less money, and use your PC freely, or you can be really aggressive with your power management and set it to save more money, which will shut down your computer more often.

If you’re using your PC for work as well as pleasure, you can create a power-saving schedule for each. So, if you want less interruption when you’re at work, you can tell Edison exactly when you’re working, and it will use your Work Time power-saving settings.

Edison has another great feature: when you click the More button, you can share the savings (of money and the environment) with other people around the world, and to see what savings they’ve been making too. “Even if we got just one per cent of PC owners to use Edison, that would be 10 million PCs saving energy,” says Allison. “We could save 3.4 metric tonnes of CO2 every year, which is the equivalent of taking 600,000 cars off the road.”

This isn’t just any third-party application fad either. Microsoft has actually recommended it on its own environmental-awareness website, at snipurl.com/5s905.

You can download Edison now for free at www.verdiem.com/edison. To get an accurate idea of what you could save on your electricity bill, you’ll need to input the amount you’re charged per kWh by looking at your last statement. Will Edison persuade you to turn on your power-saving features, or are you fed up of your screen turning off every five minutes?