Greener Computing Tips from Lifehacker

Lifehacker have come up with a list of 10 straightforward but effective energy saving tweaks all computer users can try.

First, just turn it off. Shut down when you're not using the computer - easy but many of us are guilty of leaving our machines on in the background all day.

Secondly, spin down your hard drive: "Set your computer to put your hard drive to sleep when it's not in use. This will extend the life of your drive as well as save energy."

Thirdly, remove all those pesky "energy vampires". Unplug anything that isn't actively in need of charging or being used. Think phones that are already charged and iPods already full of juice.

Also, try exploring those power saving settings that every modern computer system uses.

Also, try a smart power switch. These turn off all peripherals automatically when the main CPU is switched off. Try the Intelliplug.

Another tip: Check to see what programs run automatically when your computer starts up and ditch any that aren't necessary. Does it really need to constantly hunt down Bluetooth devices? Is there any point in searching for a wireless network when you're far away from any possible source?

Like the "energy vampires" you can also be merciless in unplugging your peripherals. Are you using your scanner right now? If not, turn it off. The same goes for printers, cameras even wireless routers.

If you use several different computers (say a Mac, one running Linux and another with standard Windows) these days there's no need to run all three. With modern programs that allow you to run all these systems on a single computer you no longer need to leave several computers running.

On a desktop it's your monitor that drains the most power, so try adjusting the settings so it's just a little less bright.

Source:hippyshopper.com/2007/07/greener_computi.html
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Everex gPC Named One of the Worst PC Desktops of the Year

The Everex gPC is a low cost computer that runs gOS, a customized version of Linux with the enlightenment theme, features mundane hardware and clocks in at $200 without a monitor. Some reviews have come in and there is little to distinguish the gPC from low cost Windows based PCs.

It has integrated graphics that default to a resolution of 1280 x 800 which presented some problems in the PCMag review. It can go higher but not by much courtesy of the underpowered UniChrome graphics chip, it has 512MB of memory and a smallish 80GB hard drive.

The review called the Via C7 1.5GHz processor slow because even out of the box, launching the web browser took longer than it should have.

Some have said the review wasn’t fair because it evaluated for what the desktop wasn’t rather than what it was. Well, the gPC is a web access only computer, don’t plan on using it for anything else. It was suggested it could be used to install another distro of Linux but it would just be better to use that older PC you have lying around somewhere.

It does manage to toss OpenOffice into the package but that was not enough to score the gPC high enough to be recommended to, well, anyone, not even basic users.

There is also the question of what the "g" in "gPC" stands for, "green" or "Google." The problem is that Google does not endorse the product in any way and gOS is made by Good OS. Note, that gOS can be downloaded for free and burnt to CDs or a DVD and installed on any system provided the hardware is supported which you have to be careful of with any distro of Linux.

And the "green" terminology is not exactly accurate, while it does manage to use only between 20W and 50W during use, the materials used in its construction may not exactly be "green."

The operating system also lacked some polish and several features seemed out of place or did not function as expected and some of the hardware included with the system is not compatible with the included operating system, though, drivers are apparently in the works.

It may be cheap, but that’s about its only redeeming quality with the review concluding, "Aside from being cheap and unaffected by Windows viruses, there’s not a lot to recommend in the Everex gPC." PCMag assigned it a rating of 1.5 out of 5. I would agree with their recommendation that anyone considering this pick up a $450 desktop with Vista that offers a bit more expandability.

Just because something sells well does not mean it is a good product.

Source:tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/12/27/everex-gpc-named-one-of-the-worst-pc-desktops-of-the-year/
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CSCI Reducing Computer Power Use by 50% in 3 year

Well, we're not quite to the point where our laptops are solar-powered and our server farms run on sewage. So for now, let's set our sights on some realistic intermediate goals, like the ones set forth by the good folks at The Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a consortium consisting of virtually every major player in the PC industry (Intel, AMD, Google, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Sun Microsystems... the list goes on and on). CSCI has an ambitious gameplan: reduce power consumed by computers worldwide by 50% over the next three years.

I know that sounds far out, but when you consider that the average lifespan of a computer today is somewhere between three and five years, that's 60-100% of all computers in use today replaced by 2010. The average desktop produced today wastes over half the power delivered to it, and the average server more than a third... so simply improving hardware energy efficiency, implementing virtualization, and using automated power management software might be enough to meet these goals. As part of a push to see improved technologies brought to market, CSCI has launched a catalog featuring many of the latest green offerings:

With 300 products, the Initiative’s new online catalog offers individuals and enterprises a comprehensive and searchable listing of Climate Savers Computing-compliant desktop PCs, laptops, servers, power supplies, power supply components, motherboards and power management software.

Unfortunately, this kinda celebrates obsolescence, and as computers use about as much energy being produced as they do during their lives, short life spans are also something that we need to deal with. Understandably, that's a problem that HP and Dell are less interested in solving.

Browsing through, one sees a lot of product listings containing third-party green certifications, such as EPEAT silver and gold, Energy Star 4.0, RoHS, and 80+. Although there are many consumer-level products available, including desktop and laptop offerings from HP, Dell, and Lenovo, this seems mainly geared towards IT professionals - servers, power supplies, converters, and rectifiers make up the bulk of the catalog. Though you can't do any holiday shopping on the site itself, it's a great place to start when searching for energy-efficient computers, components, and software.

Source:ecogeek.org/content/view/1239/
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Corporate Gifts Go Eco-Friendly

Forget the paper weight or desk clock, this year companies are saying happy holidays with an acre of rainforest.

We've all gotten them - useless company gifts that no one really wants.

There's the paper weight, useful when those giant gusts of wind whip through the office. The desk clock, just in case the clock on your computer, phone, wall and wrist simultaneously short circuit. Or the ultimate gift grab bag - beer cozy, pencil sharpener, visor, foam stress ball and vinyl Frisbee all inside a 60-oz mega slushie plastic cup.

It seems like a lot of companies are finally starting to wise up, eschewing the usual disposables and consumables in favor of something a bit more useful - the eco-gift.

"There's been so much attention in the media the past year, people figured it out," said Pam Davis, owner of Our Green House, a Sandy Hook, Conn.-based retailer of environmentally friendly products.

Davis said she's seen a roughly 50 percent rise in companies looking to buy green products in bulk this year over last year - things like reusable water bottles for the office, reusable shopping bags, or bottle openers made from old bike chains.

Rob Glickman, vice president of marketing at TheGreenOffice.com, said his company had so much interest in holiday gifts that they added a special section on their Web site highlighting the company's offerings, including a pen made from recycled wood and fair trade coffee beans.

"We aren't really a gift company, but we kept getting requests," said Glickmann, whose firm mostly sells office items like recycled paper and non-toxic ink and cleaning supplies.

The gift doesn't even have to be a take-home item.

Green Mountain Energy, an Austin, Texas-based company that sells renewable power to consumers and provides carbon offsets, began selling trees as gifts last year.

For $9.95, the buyer gets one tree planted in Texas in their name, plus a card explaining how the tree sucks up as much carbon dioxide as driving a car for 740 miles would emit, and an organic piece of paper embedded with chile pepper seeds that, when planted, will sprout into chile pepper plants.

Green Mountain has received hundreds of bulk orders for the trees and chilies, up from hardly any last year, said Gillan Taddune, the company's chief environmental officer.

"It's really got a lot of momentum," said Taddune, adding that the company plans on expanding its line of green gift offerings next year.

Firms that buy the eco-friendly gifts seem pleased.

"The response has been extremely positive," said Ellen Mann, a spokesperson for General Electric's (GE, Fortune 500) commercial finance division, which scrapped its usual gift baskets and instead gave an acre of rainforest to 1,000 customers. "Everybody gets a bottle of wine. They were excited to receive something different."

Source:money.cnn.com/2007/12/21/news/companies/green_gifts/?postversion=2007122111
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HGST Boosts Energy Efficiency Efforts With 'Green' HDDs

With the explosive growth of the Internet, digital computing and global IT infrastructures, the rise of large-scale data centers has led to an increasing awareness of their impact on power consumption. Correspondingly, the millions of consumer electronics in use today, including PCs and laptops, only add to the drain on power infrastructures. As a result, what was once largely the domain of home appliances—developing energy-efficient washers and dryers, heaters and refrigerators—has now become a much larger concern for the IT industry.

The continued development in the IT industry has led to the increasing awareness of the technologies' impact on power consumption. Millions of consumer electronics, including PCs and laptops, only add to the drain on power infrastructures, As a result, what was once largely the domain of home appliances—developing energy-efficient washers and dryers, heaters, and refrigerators—has now become a much larger concern for the IT industry.

Contributing to the energy conservation efforts, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) has introduced the Deskstar P7K500 desktop hard drive, which is touted to offer the lowest power consumption among hard drives in its class. The P7K500 improves its operational power consumption by 40 percent over the previous generation, positively impacting total PC system power requirements.

Data center, PC focus

To date, the primary focus in the IT industry has been on power consumption within the data center. More companies are opting to locate data centers near sources of inexpensive energy, such as hydroelectric power. In an August 2007 report to the U.S. Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended a series of efficiency opportunities and policies that could drive a potential $4 billion savings in annual electricity costs related to data centers.

In addition, PC power consumption is a significant expense for corporations and, in July 2007, the EPA released its ENERGY STAR 4.0 specification addressing this issue. The ENERGY STAR rating has been more closely associated with major home appliances and heating and cooling systems. The previous ENERGY STAR 3.0 specification for PCs only addressed "sleep" power and not the actual power during use. Thus, nearly all PCs, including powerful gaming systems, could easily meet the requirements. This disparity resulted in an inability to differentiate energy-efficient products from standard or even power-guzzling ones.

The new ENERGY STAR 4.0 specification calls for an 80 percent minimum power-supply efficiency and sets maximum values for standby, sleep and idle power for desktop PCs that vary depending on the performance level of the system. Tier-1 specifications in effect in 2007 are designed so that approximately 25 percent of PCs will meet requirements. A Tier-2 specification, to be released on July 1, 2009, is expected to set additional standards for PCs that do not meet the strict Tier-1 requirements.

PCs that meet the new ENERGY STAR 4.0 requirements will become increasingly popular with corporations and government agencies. Corporations may choose to purchase ENERGY STAR PCs as part of their "green" initiatives. The U.S. government signed an executive order on January 24, 2007, mandating that federal agencies must purchase PCs that meet ENERGY STAR 4.0 requirements. Similarly, the European Parliament voted on July 10, 2007 to apply energy-efficiency criteria no less stringent than ENERGY STAR requirements for the purchase of all public sector office equipment, including PCs, within the European Union.

Reduced power consumption

Hitachi GST's desktop HDDs have incorporated Advanced Power Management capabilities to reduce power consumption, beginning with the Deskstar 120GXP hard drive, which was six product generations ago. With the introduction of the Deskstar P7K500 drive, Hitachi GST has taken power efficiency one step further while maintaining 7200 RPM performance.

The Deskstar P7K500 hard drive's power consumption provides a 40-percent improvement over previous-generation products by reducing power in both idle and active modes. This reduction was achieved by using the same SoC used in Hitachi's Travelstar 2.5-inch mobile product line that offers low power to maximize battery life in notebook PCs. The SoC incorporates Hitachi Voltage Efficiency Regulator Technology, which utilizes switching regulators in place of the less-power-efficient linear regulators in the voltage reduction processes. Also included in the SoC is a more power-efficient module for the serial ATA and parallel ATA interfaces.

Power data for 50 GB Deskstar P7K500

Together with the new technologies incorporated into the Deskstar P7K500 HDD, Hitachi GST's Advanced Power Management capabilities have reduced the overall power consumption of the HDD. Through the use of the company's patented load/unload technology, the P7K500 allows for additional power reductions:

# Unload idle—The heads are safely unloaded to the ramp and the servo is shut off; this mode delivers power savings of 11 percent better than idle mode.3

# Low RPM idle—The heads are safely unloaded to the ramp, the servo is shut off and the spindle motor RPM is reduced; this setting achieves power savings of 44 percent better than idle mode.

When Advanced Power Management is enabled, the hard drive can automatically enter the lower-power idle states at intervals based on the time since the host system last accessed the hard rive. The drive can transition from normal idle (3.6W power) to unload idle (3.2W) to low RPM idle (2.0W) during periods of inactivity and return to normal operation automatically whenever the host system accesses it again. These transitions to lower-power idle states are done without intervention from the host system.

Power margin

However, the largest benefit of reducing the power consumption of the HDD in a desktop PC comes not from the savings in operating cost, but from the additional power margin in designing to the strict ENERGY STAR 4.0 requirements on idle power. Designing a 250GB Deskstar P7K500 into this system with 3.6W idle power instead of this typical HDD with 7W idle power eliminates 3.4W of nonproductive power that can instead be used to provide additional features and functions on the PC. As an example, a systems designer could add an additional optical drive (1.3W), increase the system RAM by 1GBbyte DDR2 SDRAM (1.5W) and still have 0.8W of power that could be allocated to additional ports on the motherboard.

Typical power partitioning for a 50W ENERGY STAR system

Path to green electronics

The trend toward the "greening" of IT will continue to be a driving force behind IT product development efforts as PC and server OEMs build products to comply with global energy-rating programs. Every component within these systems must also be specified to contribute to reductions in overall power consumption.

Source: http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800494110_765245_NT_dae270af.HTM
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British Government Turns Green

Public sector bodies in the UK will soon be forced to reduce their carbon footprints under new environmental legislation passed this year.

ICT has poor "green" credentials but public sector bodies in the UK will soon be forced to reduce their carbon footprints under new environmental legislation passed this year. And agency heads were warned to get their skates on in drawing up new green strategies at a recent conference, with sustainability now an imperative.

Chris Head, principal associate of the Society of IT Management (Socitm) told delegates at Headstar's recent conference, Techno-Footprint: ICT and Sustainability in the Public Sector, ICT managers and project managers must immediately begin drawing up strategies to reduce ICT energy use and heat emissions; reduce and manage ICT waste; embrace flexible and mobile working to cut transport requirements; and use technology systems to reduce other emissions and waste.

According to Dan Jellinek's e-Government Bulletin the event was used as the launch-pad for Socitm's new report Green ICT? Current research into the environmental impact of ICT. The report urges greater citizen take-up of online services as a way to cut agencies' carbon footprints.

"The Climate Change Act is going to have an impact on the UK public sector very soon, alongside EU directives on energy use," Head said. "Someone is going to be coming round and asking how much energy you use - and you don't want to be caught out as the villain."

Head told the conference it is the usage phase of the ICT life cycle that has the largest impact on carbon use, with servers and desktop PCs gobbling up energy.

"Computers use 10-20 times more carbon per unit weight than a fridge to manufacture, and then you use them for three or four years and throw them away," he said.

"Factories that make computer chips, for example, use huge amounts of noxious chemicals and huge amounts of water to wash the chemicals away.

"There can be precious little difference in purchase price between two computers, but enormous difference in carbon emissions used in manufacture."

He also said figures from the British Computer Society figures show data centres were "horrifically inefficient".

Meanwhile UK government research to be published next month suggests greater citizen take-up of online services could slash public bodies' carbon footprints. Carried out by consultants Best Foot Forward for the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), and based on data supplied by Sunderland City Council, the study showed carbon savings from online service provision greatly outweigh the losses from ICT use.

Peter Blair, head of e-government take-up at DCLG, told the conference using e-government to share services, reduce duplication, cut waste and reduce travel could significantly reduce government ICT's impact on the environment.

"Each minute spent driving to the Town Hall uses more than 20 times the energy of a minute spent transacting on the Internet. And there is amazing demand for online services if you get it right -- in Hackney, 81 percent of parents and carers applied for secondary school places online."

Overall, the research shows that annual reductions of CO2 emissions averaging 28 percent can be obtained by moving services online in five areas: planning, schools, registrar's services, environmental services and council tax, he said. Work is now being carried out to use national figures on school applications, council tax payments and other sources to scale up the projections and extrapolate to a figure for potential national savings, Blair told E-Government Bulletin.

Source: www.cio.com.au/index.php/id;1300344377
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Turn One Computer Into Ten - Free computer This Holiday

Modern desktop computers sit idle virtually the entire day while we read or type. DiscoverStation leverages this unused computing power to create an environmentally efficient alternative to traditional desktop computing. Multiple users can work on a single computer by simply attaching up to 10 monitors, mice and keyboards.

# Reduce CO2 emissions by up to 15 tons per year per system*
# Reduce electronic waste by up to 80%

Reducing the number of computers in use has additional earth friendly benefits. Electronic waste is an increasing problem globally due to the quick obsolescence of electronics. This is compounded by the fact that computer waste is high in many toxic materials such as heavy metals and flame-retardant plastics, which easily leach into ground water and bio-accumulate.

# Reduce your electricity bill, hardware and support costs

Going green will significantly reduce your electricity bill, and in an air-conditioned building the savings will be even higher. DiscoverStations ability to turn 1 computer into 10 also saves you money by greatly reducing hardware and support costs.

Using software created by an Alberta company, you can get a second computer in your house this holiday season free. In fact, the software is capable of splitting your PC into 10, saving you money and saving the environment at the same time.

Cumputer Industry Datasheet
Userful's software turns 1 computer into as many as 10 which cuts up to 70% of an organization's initial hardware investment. Because computer hardware devalues so rapidly, reducing the number of computers deployed can substantially improve an organization's bottom line. Userful's adoption of Linux and Open Source software creates further savings. Over a 3-year lifecycle on a 100-user deployment, Userful's Desktop Multiplier approach can save as much as $90,000 in hardware acquisition; $90,000 on software acquisition; and $100,000 to $200,000 per year in reduced software support and maintenance costs.

The Desktop Multiplier Approach:
Turn 1 Computer into 10. Desktop Multiplier is a multi-user product that turns a single computer box into a network of up to ten workstations. Traditional networks require a server, networking equipment and individual PCs for each user. The Desktop Multiplier approach eliminates this. Each station requires only a standard monitor, keyboard and mouse. Each user can operate simultaneously and independently, running the same or different applications securely and privately. Users can independently surf the Internet, access email, create and edit documents, yet share peripherals. The Desktop Multiplier approach substantially reduces acquisition, licensing and maintenance costs for any organization.

Userful's Public Access Computer Solution:
Userful studied the needs of a public access system and built DiscoverStation to address them. DiscoverStation is designed from the ground up specifically for public use. It is built on the Linux operating system, but closely mirrors the "look and feel" of Windows. DiscoverStation's locked-down environment blocks unwanted content access, downloads, and system changes. It automatically clears personal information and modifications between users in response to important privacy and security challenges. In addition, it is multi-lingual, supporting over 30 languages, includes web filtering, timed sessions and has accessibility features for disabled users.

Useful for any Public Computing Environment:
Userful's Desktop Multiplier approach eliminates the expense and burden of individual PCs, making it ideal for Internet cafes, call centers, voting registration, schools, hospitals, corporate training, or any other multi-computer venue. Reducing the number of computers has substantial environmental benefits as well. By replacing 10 PCs with a Desktop Multiplier with 10 workstations, CO2 emissions are reduced by approximately 2.5 tons per year.

http://userful.com/products/multi-station-how-it-works
http://userful.com/greenpc/
To download the software free, visit Userful's website
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