How to save energy with computer power-saving settings!
According to Scott Mueller of PCWorld.com, the average computer, depending on age and design, uses between 150 - 800(!!) watts while in use and 50-400 while idle. By taking advantage of power-saving configurations on your computer, you can easily save $75-100 per year per computer on your energy bill. Not only will power-saving techniques save you money, they will also extend the life of your computer and its parts and reduce the carbon footprint of your computer.
The first thing you will want to do is go to your Power Options, usually located in your Control Panel. This is where we will make all of our adjustments. If you have a laptop, you will have two columns - Plugged in and Running on Battery. Here, you will see some pulldown menus with a couple of options:
Turn off monitor
This one is pretty self-explanatory. This allows you to have the computer turn off the monitor after a certain number of minutes of no activity. By turning off the monitor, you are already saving 1/2 of the energy that you possibly can, so if you choose to do anything, do this. The quicker you have the monitor turn off after being idle, the better, but we found that anything less than 10 minutes can sometimes become annoying. While you are at it, turn the screen saver off completely, as it actually uses more energy then simply being idle. Instead, use this option.
Mission Environment Recommendation: 10 minutes
Turn off hard disks
Turning off hard disks is already accomplished by the following two options, so we ususally recommend to leave this option to never turn off. By only turning off the hard disks, you barely save any energy yet compromise convenience.
Mission Environment Recommendation: Never
System Standby/Sleep
System Standby (or sometimes called Sleep) turns the monitor, hard drive, video and sound cards, and almost everything else off. It saves your current state in the RAM. Once you decide to use the computer again, simply move the mouse and everything instantly turns back on. This saves substantial amounts of energy. The only drawback is that in the case of a power outage, your current state and all unsaved open documents will be lost. For desktops (and laptops for their plugged in option), we recommend using this option over hibernate, at a time of 30 minutes. For laptops (running on battery option), we recommend using hibernate instead.
Mission Environment Recommendation: Desktops and plugged in laptops, 30 minutes.
System Hibernate
System Hibernate is similar to Standby/Sleep in the way that it shuts everything down and allows you to return to your computer just the way you left it. But the difference is how it stores your information to allow you to return as if you never left. Instead of storing the information in the RAM, it write all of the information to the hard drive, and then shuts absolutely everything down. This allows you to shut down the memory as well, where in Standby, you cannot. Memory does not use up much energy, so this is not that big of a deal. Also, if for some reason your computer loses power, the information is stores on the hard drive, so you do not lose your information. Since this does save fractionally more energy then Standby, we recommend it only for laptops, especially while running on battery.
Mission Environment Recommendation: 30 minutes for laptops running on battery
So there you have it. Now go ahead and make these changes and watch your enegy bill shrink and your wallets get fatter! If you want any more information on this subject, there is much more information all over the web. Here are a few quality sources:
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,137328/printable.html
http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/tools/pwr_mgmt.html
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_power_management
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_power_mgt_faq
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