Edison is a new and free energy-saving PC software from the developers at Verdiem. The software makes it a lot easier for you to control your computers power saving features helping you save electricity and money.

Edison doesn’t shut down your computer completely; it just puts it in a “suspend mode” which uses much less energy than if the computer would be running normally. You can decide if you want to schedule Edison to shut down the computer screen and hard drive before going into the suspend mode. The software also displays how much electricity, CO2 emissions, and money you have saved.

(more…)

Earlier this May I reported that Dell was going to sell a “never before seen” eco-inspired computer with a bamboo casing later this year. We could also see an early design concept of the computer. And now Dell has released their brand new eco-friendly computer, the Studio Hybrid. It’s small and it looks great.

According to Dell the Studio Hybrid is their “smallest, most personalized and most environmentally responsible consumer PC” to date. The computer is about 10% smaller than the average desktop minitower. It also uses up to 70% less energy and is Energy Star 4.0 compliant.

(more…)

Consider this statement: “The EPA’s Energy Star efficiency criteria only consider the energy a PC uses while it’s in standby mode, which means that almost all current PCs qualify as Energy Star compliant.”

Is that statement true or false?

What about this: “Constantly shutting down and restarting your computer during the day would consume more energy than just leaving it running.”

Is that true or false?

If you are a bit unsure you might want to check out the Sierra Club’s “How Green is My PC” quiz. The quiz will ask and tell you about ten different questions related to your computers energy usage, environmental impacts etc.

Thanks to Tedd Riggs for the link.

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:

(more…)