on Mar 7th, 2007
Help your PC use less electricity
As any good ‘greeny’ knows, you should always switch electrical appliances off when they are not in use and never leave things on standby because they are still consuming electricity (which is either just plain wasteful at best or carbon polluting at worst).
Computers, on the other hand can be a bit of a dilemma. As someone who has worked in IT for a long time, I can remember years ago, service engineers commenting that some pieces of IT kit lasted longer if they were always left switched on (switching off and on causes cooling and heating cycles which can apparently lead to problems, although that might just be an old wives tale!). It’s not always convenient to ’shut down’ your PC when it can take an age to start up again, but help may be at hand to put right something that Microsoft should have done years ago.
Local Cooling is a free application that you download onto your PC running under Windows XP that automatically optimizes your PC’s power consumption by using a more effective power save mode. You will be able to see your electricity savings in real-time translated to more environmental terms such as how many trees and (US) gallons of oil you have saved.
According to the maker, Local Cooling will:
- Cut your energy bills
- Reduce the amount of Greenhouse Gas CO2 emissions as a result of your reduced PC power consumption
- Give you full control over your power mode settings
- Improve your overall computing experience and efficiency
- Show you in detail how much you have saved since installing the software.
You might be wondering why your PC isn’t automatically optimised for power saving in the first place. The reality is that you can make your PC do all the things that Local Cooling does, provided you know your way around the Windows Control Panel, but as some of the settings are pretty obscure, Local Cooling seems to provide an easy and convenient method to set everything. Sure, Microsoft should have automatically set Windows to do this in the first place, but they didn’t (at least Windows Vista has default energy saving options that are more appropriate).
I haven’t tried Local Cooling myself, so I can’t recommend it one way or another (perhaps if you try it, you could let GreenVeg know how you get on?), but what makes this an attractive proposition is that it puts the energy you have saved into a tangible format, and encourages ‘competition’ to see who is saving the most - making saving energy a bit more fun and less focussed on ‘giving things up’ is a neat trick.
Go to the Local Cooling site: www.localcooling.com
Thanks to Nigel for passing the information onto me.
I’m just installing it. I’ve always turned my computer off if I knew I would be away for more than 15 mins, to the chagrin of the local ‘it breaks them’ expert …
Martin, I have just upgraded to a new computer, old stock so cheaper, with xp not vista. I can download vista for free within the next 6 weeks if I want. If it saves energy I might do so, but am I better off with tried and tested xp and the local cooling site?
Hi Ann, properly configured, Vista should not be any better or worse (from an energy perspective) than Windows XP (with Local Cooling for example). It really comes down to whether you would need the extra features that Vista offers. Currently, I am NOT running Vista and have no plans to do so for the next 6 months - my view is let others iron out the problems! In fairness, Vista does seem to be more ’secure’ than XP, but it also needs more memory etc to run - which might not be a problem for you. I suppose what I’m saying is that it’s down to you - unless anyone else can offer some advice???
No plans here to be a beta tester for Vista, nor encourage bloat-ware. But I’ll be reverting to Linux soon.