A study says making the average PC requires 10 times the weight of the product in chemicals and fossil fuels. – BBC
Running it takes a lot of energy as well. Here are some tips for green computing.
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1. Screen saver does not save energy
A screen saver is just another comptuer programm that runs on your computer. It animate your desktop to save the phosphors in your CRT monitor screen. Nowerdays most people use LCD screens and screen saver is just useless. A screen saver consumes as much as electricity as when you play game on it. A blank screen saver is slightly better but even that only reduces monitor energy consumption by a few percent.
Therefore, turn the screen off when you are not going to use it for a while.
2. Enable power management features
For a windows machine, you will find ‘Power options’ under control panel. You can configure your comptuer so that it can ‘power down’ your hard disk and screen if it is not in use for some time.
3. No standby.
- Turn off your computer and/or peripherals when they are not in use. Turning on and off will not harm them.
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Turn off at night and on weekends
- Look for ways to reduce the amount of time your computer is on without adversely affecting your productivity. Actually, BBC said somebody was sacked because he/she was addicted to Ebay!!
4. Get a greener equipment
- Unless you need to deal with large images and spreadsheet, a 17″ screen is good enough for normal users. If you are still using CRT monitor, please get in touch of freecycle.org and get rid of it. I say so because CRT consume much more power than LCD and the price of LCD are very affordable nowerdays.
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A laptop saves more energy than a desktop as well.
- Get a greener pc. Some business has already developed PC that is more green than average:
http://www.very-pc.co.uk/?section=home-pcs
5. Support Green computing
Persuade your colleagues and family members to support green computing. Donate money to green orgnizations. And finally, have a look at this:
http://www.explan.co.uk/hardware/solo.shtml