Energy Pig?

[lsanderson]

Putting Energy Hogs in the Home on a Strict Low-Power Diet
By LARRY MAGID

I THOUGHT I was pretty good about energy conservation, but it turns out that I’ve been a bit of a hypocrite. I drive a reasonably fuel-efficient car, I work at home so I don’t use fuel to commute and I am replacing incandescent bulbs in my home with energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs.

But I am also a prodigious computer user, and it looks as if that makes me an energy hog. I started checking how much electricity my electronics were consuming when I wasn’t using them. I used a Kill A Watt EZ energy meter (available online for about $25) and began measuring. My PC was continuously drawing 134 watts all night. More

I then installed Co2 Saver (co2saver.snap.com),a free program for Windows XP and Vista that seems to have solved the problem. It gives you a simple control panel to specify when to turnoff monitors and disk drives and put the machine to sleep. It also adjusts some hard-to-configure settings. One option forces the machineto “Initiate sleep mode if system doesn’t sleep automatically.” This feature, according to its developer, Lee Hasiuk, defeats Windows attempts to keep a machine awake if it thinks (correctly or otherwise)that it is detecting a background task other than mouse or keyboard activity. Now my machine sleeps and wakes properly almost all the time.

Whatever machine you’re using, consider having it go into sleep,standby or hibernate after about a half-hour of inactivity. The shorter the period, the more energy you save. Graphic-intense screen savers can actually waste power.

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If you want to get really into it, www.silentpcreview.com has all kinds of info on PCs and power usage.