Page 63 -

The Greening of IT
28 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

These screen-saver programs also involve system interaction with your
CPU that results in additional energy consumption. A blank screen saver
is slightly better, but even that reduces monitor energy consumption by
only a few percent.

Enable Power Management Features
Thanks to the U.S. Environment Protection Agency (EPA), personal
computer systems purchased today can be easy on energy. You can pro-
gram these Energy Star computers and monitors to power-down auto-
matically to a low power state when they are not being used. You can
achieve these efficiency gains without any sacrifice in computing per-
formance.
The EPA estimates that providing all computers in the United States
with sleep mode reduces their energy use by 60 percent to 70 percent—
and ultimately saves enough electricity each year to power Vermont,
New Hampshire, and Maine; cut electric bills by $2 billion; and reduce
carbon-dioxide emissions by the equivalent of five million cars.
How can we achieve such impressive savings? Follow these simple
ptg
steps to access computer and monitor power management features for
®
Macintosh and Windows .
Macintosh: From any application, select the Apple menu. Select
System Preferences, (OS X) or Control Panels (OS 9) and then click
Energy Saver.
Windows: Point your cursor at the desktop background and right-
click. From the pop-up menu, choose Properties. Go to the Screen Saver
®
page; in the lower-right corner near the ENERGY STAR logo, click
the Settings button. This brings up another dialog box from which you
choose power management settings.
The University of Colorado gives recommended settings of 20 min-
utes for monitor sleep and 30 minutes for system sleep. Remember that
to save energy with your monitor’s built-in power management system,
your monitor must go to sleep (shut itself down). As a comparison, IBM
recommends that employees use a setting of 15 minutes of inactivity to
power-off the monitor and 30 minutes of inactivity for system sleep
mode.

“When Not in Use, Turn Off the Juice”
This is the most basic energy conservation strategy for any type of
equipment. Consider the following: