HOWTO: Save Electricity Used By Your Computer

This is a habit well worth getting into. Many PC's at home, or in an office are left on day and night. This uses a lot of unnecessary power.

Clearly this may be easier said than done when you have work that is on going.

Avoid starting more than one thing on the computer. Read below to see how and other reasons not to do this.

If you really can not bring yourself to shut everything down, familiarise yourself with the Hibernate options available on Windows, Linux and Mac software which will save a current session completely and shut down.

You can save time and money on a computer by planning what you intend to do on it before turning it on.

Do not simply fill the desktop up with stuff you are in the middle of - you will not finish it that way.

Get into good planning habits. Save your files regularly, including "Work In Progress" copies if required, and then use a simple notepad (pen & paper) to note down your context so you can pick it up when you get back. Any person should be able to do this.

Set up a task, turn on the PC and get on with that task. When you have finished that, or need to do something else, write down what you need to do next with that particular task, and then save and close down all the associated programs.

Bookmark any related webpages instead of leaving tabs open, and if you know the browser well, group them into a folder. Firefox has a useful tool - if you right click on a tab, it allows you to "bookmark all tabs", which will group them into a bookmarks folder. Avoid relying on the Firefox setting to show all the last tabs open when restarting for all the reasons below.

Here are good reasons to get into this habit:

• You will get more done and not simply procrastinate on the web. Although procrastinating on the web is actually quite good for ideas and relaxing at times, it is counter productive when you actually want to do something.


• By having many tasks on the go, you will loose track of what you have done, and may find that you have got very little achieved at all.


• The more things you are doing at once, the less easy it will be to close everything and shut down at the end of the session.


• Having many open documents means that you increase the amount of work lost if something goes wrong.

As having many programs open also taxes the CPU and memory more, it is worth understanding what happens to your computer when you have many, many programs open at once.

• Generally it raises the risk of instability - crashes and corrupted files, or lost work.


• Beware - programs open may have interactions you have not prepared for. This may seriously lower the computers stability and cause it to crash.


• CPU usage increases - this also reduces stability, and means that programs may start to pause (hang) or crash and break. The computer may become unresponsive. It will also drain more power on modern CPU's which normally "throttle" their speed, lowering it when lightly used. It will cause the CPU to heat up, meaning the fan will need to speed up, and the longevity of both the fan and CPU are reduced. Heat is usually a very bad thing in a computer case.


• Memory usage increases. The amount of RAM used will go up, and on modern systems a certain amount of this is actually "Virtual Memory", where things are temporarily written to a hard disk and then brought back into physical RAM when needed. This is known as paging, or swapping. The more memory you use, the more of this virtual memory is used. The more programs there are using virtual memory, the more often swapping will occur. This may mean that the hard disk becomes very busy - known as thrashing. It will drain power, lower stability, cause pauses and hangs, and also reduce the longevity of the hard drive and PC in general.

Good planning, and finishing up tasks, or writing down where you were and closing things so you can take them up again later, will prevent you running the risks highlighted here.

Thinking Rock is software that really allows quick and structured planning of your tasks.

HOWTO: Use ThinkingRock to organise your thoughts.

It should be considered an essential part of freeing your computer to be switched off and not getting bogged down with 20+ tabs of stuff you might get round to reading someday.

Every recent system, be it Mac, Windows or Linux allow you to set up power saving features that will put monitors into standby (not as good as turning it off), spin down hard disks, throttle CPU speeds and slow fans. All of these things will save power. If you can, set the hibernate mode of the PC up so that you can use this to shut down without worrying too much about context. Set it to automatically turn off after an hour without usage or so. Take time to learn and familiarise yourself with these settings, and they will allow you to have a less power hungry, and quieter machine.

I also found that for Windows (XP or Vista, including x64) there is a piece of software known as Local Cooling. Local cooling automatically adjusts your Windows computers settings to optimal power saving settings. Ensure you check the settings, and take note of the hibernate/shutdown settings and adjust these to your taste.

Peripherals like the monitor, printer, speakers, external drives and so on all drain power when turned on. Get into the habit of turning them off when the computer is off. Right at the wall socket, as even in standby they are drawing power.

Also get into the habit of turning them off when taking screen breaks. There is no use leaving the monitor on when away from the computer. One exception may be to leave the speakers on playing music while you are taking a break, but generally, you can turn it all off.

Removing CD/DVD's that are not in use from the drives is also a way to save power, as the computer will spin it up and check it from time to time when a disk is present, including on start up.

Find a surge master power strip with switches for all the sockets - the best will detect when the PC is turned off, and power down the other sockets. I use a Belkin Surge Master Model F5C100u, which is probably a bit ancient now and has no automatic switch off. It is an under-monitor socket array, with labelled sockets for monitor, printer, computer as well as an AUX1 and 2. On the front panel, right under the monitor is a bank of individual pushbutton toggles for these sockets. When I take a break, I can quickly flick off all but the computer. When required, turning off the PC itself is a doddle. The Surge Master comes with additional things like a lifetime guarantee, LED's to indicate when it is protected and earthed and a main power off button.

I have listed below some power saving strips that can automatically power down devices in standby mode.

If you are a complete geek, you may by now have three or four PC's running different Operating systems and set up for different purposes. It is clearly good if you can save power by combining their functionality.

I totally understand why someone would not want different environments to interfere with each other, and I do not mean installing everything you would ever want onto one Operating System which would quickly become bloated, bogged down and clogged.

I strongly suggest getting into Virtual Machines. These are programs which either emulate, or virtualise CPU's, BIOS's and a whole PC allowing you to install another OS in the Virtual Machine, stop and start it when needed, hibernate it relatively simply and all without much changes to the host system - the system that the Virtual Machine runs inside.

Terminology:

• Host OS - the operating system that the virtual PC runs inside


• Guest OS - the operating system that runs inside the virtual PC


• Emulation - When software creates a layer that runs exactly like a piece of hardware.


• Virtualisation - When software lightly wraps real hardware exposing it to the use of the guest OS. This is much faster than Emulation.


• Virtual Disks - A disk "image" is a large file on the hosts file system that emulates a complete file system for the guest.


• Raw Disk Access - being able to expose real hard disks to a virtual machine allowing them to interact with real partitions.

I recommend that a reader interested in this get to know Virtual Box which is fairly easy to get started with as virtual machines go, and has a lot of very advanced features. It is also (and this I like a lot) free. Virtual Box allows creation of many virtual machines, native (raw) disk access and plenty of other features.

You can then sell or use FreeMesa to get rid of the additional PC's, saving power and space in the room. Also I suspect it will be much quieter.

If you are a computer tinkerer, like me, then you will have little fear in opening up a PC to replace the graphics card. There are now a number of recent graphics cards (for example the NVidia 8500 series) which are available as fanless cards. This will not only save money, but make the PC significantly quieter.

Similarly, replacing small whiney fans with larger, lower RPM fans on the CPU and other places will make for a quieter and power saving PC.

If you have an older AMD computer with a Socket 754 motherboard, you can successfully use a Laptop Socket 754 CPU in this desktop board, which will actually make a significant power saving. This does depend on the particular brand of motherboard, and has its caveats.