“Reduce your carbon footprint!” It’s the plea of the new millennium, currently being heard everywhere in an attempt to get us to lower the amount of energy we all use. PCs account for around nine per cent of the world’s electricity consumption – the figure may sound small but it’s actually a startling amount of power use.
So, short of ripping all the mains sockets out of your home, is there anything you can do to lower this figure? Well, yes actually, there’s quite a lot.
Leaving your PC running when you’re not actually using it wastes a lot of energy, but if you put it in a low power state at times when you’re using it intermittently and then turn it off at the mains when not in use, your energy consumption drops dramatically.
The Energy Savings Trust’s most recent report highlighted that even if you’ve got a powerful PC, you can cut its electricity bill down from well over £100 per year to around £35 per year.
We have the technology
Windows Vista provides an excellent tool to lower your energy usage, which you can find by typing Power Options in the Start Search box. From here you can choose from three pre-set options, which differ depending on how much energy you want to save and what performance you need from your PC. If you’d like to customise your own plan, click on Create a power plan in the left-hand pane of the Power Options window and select how long you’d like your monitor to stay on, and how long before your PC goes into Sleep mode.
You can do more than just change a couple of settings, though; if you really want to get involved in your PC’s power management, click on Change plan settings underneath any of the custom or pre-set plans. Click on Change advanced power settings and you can alter many of your hardware or software settings – if you’d like to change when your hard drive powers down, you can do it from here.
Putting you in control
If you want something a little different, you can download the LocalCooling power management software that is currently in beta testing. It does pretty much the same thing as the Power Options, but goes one step further by incorporating a display which tells you how much power your computer is consuming, and which hardware device is consuming the most.
It also gives you the option to allow certain programs to automatically power up your PC when they’re in use, so if you’re using Windows Live Messenger and you want your PC to wake up when you receive a new message, you can configure it to do so.
You can even download a program from better than everyone that turns off the Aero graphical interface when you disconnect the mains from a notebook and turns it back on when it’s reconnected.
Spend to save
Effortlessly turn your mains off. If you regularly turn off your PC to save electricity, you can now conserve your own energy while doing so; the Bye Bye Standby kit remotely turns off your mains without you having to fiddle around with tangled cords and awkward-to-reach switches.
Low power consuming PC. The Very PC Green PC 478 uses about half the power of a regular computer – saving you a considerable amount of money over a long-term period.
Energy-efficient power supply unit. Akasa produces a range of 80 PLUS power supply units that exceed the 80 per cent mark for energy efficiency in use, so if you’re building a new computer or upgrading an existing one, then its 400W or 500W power supply units are defi nitely worth considering.
Notebook solar charger. Solar power that really works (especially in this country) might still seem like a bit of a strange concept, but it does, and best of all it’s free.
Flat-screen LCD monitor. All you need to do to save one big chunk of electricity is to get rid of your hefty CRT monitor, which uses up to twice as much power as a TFT LCD one.
Notebook PC. Notebooks use, on average, 70 per cent less energy than desktops.
Solid-state drive. You don’t get much disk space for your money, but a solid-state drive uses less power than regular hard drives because it has no moving parts.
Energy Efficient. Look for the Energy Efficient Label on new PCs. You could save up to £150 over the lifetime of its use if it bears the logo.
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