Save Power and The Planet - How to Set Your Computer's Power Options

You’ll find XP’s built-in power options by going into the control panel, choosing the ‘Performance and maintenance section’, then selecting ‘Power Options’. This will give you the choice of switching from the default High Performance settings to either Automatic or Battery Saver modes. Be aware that this may affect your machine’s performance, so you might have to experiment for a while and see if any trade-off is worthwhile.

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Sleep mode is now the default mode when you leave your machine unattended for a fixed time, so think very carefully about changing this setting. In particular, opting to run a screensaver is a costly choice: doing so costs an average of $11 a year in extra power.

If you have Vista on your network, you no longer need to rely on old-fashioned nagging to persuade users to shut down their machines when not in use. Vista allows you to set power management options centrally. And don’t forget you can now put machines into Sleep mode remotely without worrying about losing any data if users haven’t saved their work properly.

Because there’s no ‘standard’ edition of Linux, power management options can vary greatly. You’ll need to check any support information that came with your distribution or consult relevant support forums. However, a useful trick that should work in all versions is to run the command ‘powertop’. This tells you which processes are still running when your PC is idle, some of which you may not need.

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