Power Usage for Computer Users

I run XP on Athlon AMD I hibernate now instead of just cruising into stand by. It is much quieter and consumes much less power, just hold down shift key and click standby icon. To come back just touch the power on button. Clicking the mouse or tapping the key board is no good.

One way to save energy is to use a notebook computer

For Windows Platform:

If you prefer to use a desktop machine then opt for an LCD monitor. You can further save more energy for a desktop computer when it becomes idle (you don't need to turn off your computer every time is becomes idle). Go to Control Panel select Performance and Maintenance and opening Power Options. Assign time duration in minutes or even hours, depending on the selection, when your monitor will turn off, hard drive will turn off, when system will standby and when system will hibernate. You can immediately use your computer anytime by simply moving your mouse or by pressing the power button in the case when your computer hibernated.

You can also do a similar Power Options setting for a notebook computer especially if you are using power from the notebook battery.

I am not very familiar with power saving features of the Linux Platform but we have 3 Linux server running non-stop. We have not yet determined power consumption at this time. By the way, you can run Linux servers without the monitor.

The Mac Platform also has some power saving features that I am not very familiar with.

I think what you pointed out is more for a really experienced user, but thanks for pointing that out, I didn't know anything like that existed. I think for the average person, it would be a little much to mess with. I think something like that would only benefit a laptop, or huge banks of computers where saving a few watts of power adds up to extra battery minutes or energy savings.

I've actually tried saving power on my computer (I measured it with an ammeter) by lowering core/agp/pci voltages and under-clocking the Processor, Graphics card (core and ram), and the FSB (front side bus) as low as it could go and still be stable (ie. not crash because it's not designed to run slower) I still only saved 25-30 watts which is hardly anything considering it was originally using 150 watts and it was at least 30% slower doing processor intensive tasks. I could probably save 5 or 10 more watts by disabling unnecessary hardware but it's a huge hassle because you have to figure out how to re-enable it when you want to use it. You can change some power options in the control panel but probably best not to change things if you don't know what the options do. There shouldn't be anything that you can seriously mess up in there, but still.

You can check wikipedia for your processor to see how much power it supposedly uses at full power. The next computer I build, I will partially base my decision on how much power the components will use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpu_power_consumption

That list has nearly every processor that I could think of. All the modern ones are at the bottom of the list.

Well, if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

-Nick