There you are. Sitting at your computer at work. Maybe eating a bagel from the conference room meeting that just let out. Waiting for your next meeting to start. Reading this blog.
Time for your meeting. You stand up and go. “Hey what about me?” your monitor screams, “Turn me off.” You listen and turn it off.
Congratulations, you just saved some energy. I just read this article that talks about how Google, HP and Dell, Microsoft, and IBM are all going to work on increasing the energy saving options on computers. But none of it will work as well as it can if we do not turn the things off.
The article makes the usual pie in the sky claims about saving enough energy to close 20 coal power plants. And I think just on the face of it that that is too high of a claim. But then I would take even one power plant not being built.
Here are the two easy things to do to save some computer energy:
You can also set up your system to do this after a certain time period when you aren’t sitting there clicking on the next energy saving blog or reading your email. I have Windows XP and there in the Control Panel is one icon called “Power Options” from there you can set when your monitor, hard drives and whole system saves power.
In my set up, I have a problem with these though. I run a program called the “World Community Grid” to use my unused chip processing power to help solve medical problems. Right now as I am typing this, my computer is working to cure AIDS. (not all by itself of course, but it’s helping.) This program and power savers don’t seem to work well since the program is always actively running, making it hard for the computer to know it is not doing anything.
And in case you are saying to yourself, “Hey, my little computer doesn’t use that much power, how much can I affect the whole world and its problems?” Read my next blog in a few days.
