Yesterday I talked about how you can fight global warming by buying a laptop due to the fact that they generally use less energy than an ordinary desktop computer.

But it doesn’t really matter if you use a laptop or a desktop computer if you don’t activate the computers power saving settings. And don’t think for a second that your computers screen saver saves energy. Unless the screen or backlight on a laptop or desktop screen actually turns off, a screen saver uses as much power as word processing.

So the best way to save energy is to activate your computers power saving features. Activate your computers sleep mode so that your computer goes to “sleep” while you are (afk) away from keyboard. But don’t worry! Activating the sleep mode doesn’t mean that the computer shuts itself off while you’re not around. All the work and things you were doing before will still be there when you return.

You can also choose to switch off your monitor or spin down the hard drives after a certain amount of time away from your computer. Your power settings also allow you to completely shutdown your computer if you haven’t used it for a while.

But doing all this can be tricky if you aren’t an experienced computer user. So the easiest way is to use a program called LocalCooling. It’s a neat program where it’s only downsides are that it only works on Windows computers.

LocalCooling let’s you easily decide what kind of power saving mode you want to use on your computer and it shows you how much energy your computer uses. The best part is that it shows how many trees, gallons of oil or electricity you have saved when having these power saving settings on. It’s really neat!

If you want you are welcome to join Green-Blogs very own LocalCooling group. This is how you do:

1. Download Local Cooling for free from http://www.localcooling.com

2. Install and set everything up as you like it.

3. Create an free user account over at http://www.localcooling.com

4. Login to your account in the program you’ve just downloaded. If you don’t you will not be able to track how much power you have saved.

5. Login to your account over at http://www.localcooling.com

6. Once logged in go to “My Account” and customize your account. Over at “Edit Your Account Details” look for a form called “Join a Group”. In this form you need to type in: “green-blog.org”

Now you have joined the Green Blog group!