Last week Bob started a topic in the forum asking whether people shutdown their computers at night or just put them in sleep mode. Most of the responses were along the lines of shutting down the computer, but as for myself I put it into hibernation or sleep mode. The reason I do that is I normally have several applications open that I’m using, and I don’t want to close them all down just to restart them the next day. I also put my computer into sleep several times throughout the day whenever I’m not going to use it for more than an hour.
There is an initiative that has started which is more for fun than anything else. It’s called Local Cooling and it’s goal is to save the planet one computer at a time. It’s a simple little application that you run on your computer, and it tells you how many Watts of power items like your hard drive and monitor are using up. It then helps you optimize your computer by adjusting settings like shutting off your monitor, or turning your computer off after a specified period of time.
The power consumption calculations do not seem to be as technical as they sound. For example, it looks like they just check to see what size monitor you’re using, and use a general power consumption figure for the calculations. Then they keep track of how much power you’re now using, and also how many trees and gallons of gas you’ve saved with the reduced power state.
If you have a LocalCooling.com account it will upload the stats to their site so that they can keep track of the global savings from using their application. As of right now they have 122,569 users that have saved a total of 1,113,510.0 KWh! That’s equal to 534,484.8 gallons of oil and 59,016.03 trees, and they say that "the CO2 emissions from just 15 computers are equivalent in energy terms to the gas consumption used by one car." So you really can make a difference.
Before you go and download this program I should point out that it doesn’t really do anything that you’re computer can’t already do. Most operating systems are already equipped with power-saving techniques like this, but Local Cooling is just trying to make the everyday user aware that these features exist. So while you may not see how this is useful to you, maybe you should also be thinking about other people that this would be helpful for. Now is the time to think about your family and friends who have no interest going into the Control Panel to configure these settings, but you know darn well that they would get a kick out of this app.
Local Cooling Homepage
Source: WebWare
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Tags: Software, Windows, Applications, Computers, Settings
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Too many of these “save the earth” sites. Even Yahoo! has one (green.yahoo.com)
Never had much success hibernating my computer. I cain’t get it to wake up and have to reboot. I do however have Windows setup to turn of my monitor after 10 minutes of inactivity. I don’t do the hard disks though as this seemed to create problems.
Wow. There are really people out there who just leave their PC on all the time?
I can’t quite imagine why anyone would put up with the performance hit! Not to mention the electricity bill…
I have the power button on my PC set to hibernate, so if I don’t want to lose what I’m doing, I just push the button. Simple!
Absolutely. As for people not having had success with Hibernating?? Something must be up with their system. It works flawlessly. I never ever ever ever restart my Windows unless I am forced to by an App, update or instability after uptime is several days.
How do you enable turning off the monitor? On my Dell Laptop, it has Dell Quickset to do that, but is there some way to do it without this software?
I only switch off my monitor after 10 minutes of inactivity.
Global warming? Global cooling? I have been through these cycles before- both assumptions are based on short term, bad science. As my meterologist friend, Herb (a scientist who actually is knowledgeable in the field of weather, global heating and cooling cycles et. al.) commented “I can superficially prove either global warming or cooling or about anything else if I cherry pick the data and ignore anything else that conflicts with my purpose of trying to persuade others less knowledgeable to my point of view” I would really like to find a rational, scientific presentation which examines most of the available data which supports and/or refutes the concept of global warming.. Al Gores’ presentation was more of a sermon than a scientific presentation.. JS
I’ve heard of several people having problems hibernating their systems, and I think it is often due to graphics card issues.
You can pick the option in your power options which is located in the Control Panel.