I have to admit that for years I had two desktop PCs running day and night in my home. The sad thing is, I knew better! While I don't recommend this for obvious energy conservation reasons, many people do have their desktop machines at home up and running at all times simply for convenience sake. While in a perfect world we would all power down our machines when not in use, there are power optimization strategies we can take advantage of to save energy and money while retaining much of the convenience of an always-on PC that we're used to.
Most computers today have settings that will let you tailor a power management strategy that you can live with and will work for you. This can really help folks like myself that often get distracted and simply forget to shut down their machines. The key to making improvements is in understanding what you can do and match that to what you can live with. Below, I've listed some tactics you can employ to reduce your computer's energy consumption. Before I jump into that though, there are some terms to get familiar with:
- Standby: Your PC doesn't shut down but the display shuts down, the disk drive powers down, and you are unable to interact with it until you wake it up. Typically you can exit sleep mode simply by moving your mouse or pressing a key on the keyboard. .
- Hibernation: Normally this shuts down the PC but saves the current status of all running programs to disk so that when you press the power button to re-start the PC, you boot very quickly and are returned right to where you left off. .
- Shutdown: PC is completely powered off. You will need to wait for a complete cold-boot and re-login to your machine as well as re-start any applications you want to use.
Now that you're familiar with the terminology, here's those power saving strategies I promised rated by the amount of energy they'll save you.
- Good: Set your display to shut down after 10 minutes of inactivity. Your display is typically the peripheral that draws the most electricity and is your first place to focus on for energy savings. This way if you forget to power off your monitor or get distracted, it will automatically go into standby mode and will wake up again when you move the mouse.
-
Better: Now that you have your display set to save energy, the next area to focus on is your CPU and hard drive. Most operating systems will have multiple options for putting these into hibernation at various times of inactivity. I have mine set to 30 minutes but you can set this to the time frame to what works best for you.
-
Best: Power off your PC and all peripherals when not in use. You may want to set yours for automatic shutdown if inactive for 60 minutes.
Unfortunately, most machines are shipped with these power options turned off as it's the assumed preference for consumers. The good news is that things are changing! Intel and Google have recently created the Computing Initiative to help us, and businesses everywhere, reduce our power consumption. They are targeting both desktop and data center servers on two fronts. First, they're looking to improve the power consumption of the CPUs and secondly, they're working with the “Energy Star” agency so that PC manufacturers in the future will ship all new desktops and servers in the “Energy Saver” mode as their default setting.
When looking on your PC for how to make these setting changes, here are some tips on where to look.
- Windows: Power Options in Control Panel
- Mac: Power Management Options "Energy Saver" settings
- Linux: For you propeller heads out there, Linux provides utilities for power management as well. Look for “Power Saving” in your desktop utilities.
