Keep your PC green using Windows Vista

We’ve all seen the photos: polar bears teetering on ice cubes, tornadoes in Taunton (OK, in the USA) and frogs raining down in Frome. Well, perhaps not that last one – but Mother Nature, it seems, is wreaking revenge for our environmental abuse. Unfortunately, PCs are part of the problem. Making them is an environmental menace, using them wastes energy, and dumped desktops poison the planet.

One of the biggest problems is dumping. PCs contain lots of hazardous chemicals and, with two million PCs dumped in UK landfills every year, many of those chemicals end up in the soil. The situation is even worse in Asia, where much of the West’s obsolete equipment ends up. Greenpeace scientist Kevin Bridgden has visited Chinese breakers’ yards and reports: “They are horrific. In Southeast China I found acid baths leaching into streams; they were so acidic they could dissolve a coin in just a matter of hours”.

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Here in the UK, domestic energy use is thought to be a bigger contributor to climate change than cars or factories. Just leaving electrical equipment on standby instead of switching it off generates four million tonnes of extra CO2 per year. That isn’t just bad news for polar bears; it’s bad for us, too – and it’s bad for our wallets. All that wasted energy costs us £740 million per year.

Green PC guide

Green computing needn’t be difficult. If you’re looking for a new PC, buying second hand is the greenest (and cheapest) option – but even buying new can be green if you look for kit that doesn’t eat electricity. While a standard PC might use around 200 watts, high-end gaming PCs use several times that amount. Green gamers might be better off with an Xbox 360 than a high-end PC – its graphics card can draw up to 120W of power.

You don’t need to buy a new PC to be green, though. Using the power options available with Windows Vista is a big help – you can make almost every component more energy-efficient – and unplugging unnecessary USB devices reduces your PC’s power consumption. Minimising the number of running programs helps, too: the more your PC does, the more power it needs. When you’re away from your PC, use Shut Down instead of Sleep.

Last but not least, there’s recycling. You can recycle your printer paper, toner and ink cartridges and buy recycled replacements, and you can choose second-hand or refurbished kit and components rather than new ones. When your PC approaches obsolescence you can recycle it too: this year manufacturers will offer take-back schemes so you can return unwanted kit (some, such as Dell, have already started) or you could do what we do and either sell old systems on eBay, give them to family and friends or donate them to charity. Just remember to securely wipe the hard disk first – or you might find that someone’s used your online banking to recycle all your cash.

Gary Marshall is a freelance journalist who writes about technology, the Internet and pop culture. His website can be found at www.bigmouthstrikesagain.com.