Keeping Your Computer Green and Your Power Bill Low

[Mynd Hed]

This is a continuation from an OT tangent in a video game forum thread.

Anybody here mess around with standby modes, low-power components, and the like to keep your computer from sucking down electricity like a freshman at a kegger?

I've been fiddling with my computer's standby settings, got it into S3 mode, which is supposed to be the best balance between saving power and being able to activate it quickly. (My comp boots faster than most since it has the OS on a 10k rpm hard drive and I keep it relatively free of software bloat, but it's still not exactly what I call "fast.")
I've been happy with it so far, although I noticed today that when I set it to automatically enter standby after idling for a half hour, it did so even when I was defragging my hard drive, which crashed the defragger. You'd think somebody somewhere who works on such things would've said, "Durr, maybe it's not a good idea to go into standby when a program is making massive changes to the hard drive," but I guess not. )-:

Unfortunately I built my computer just before the Core 2 Duo hit, so I'm using a more power-hungry Athlon 64 X2 3800+. Next time I'll have to look a little more closely at power consumption when I'm choosing my parts; I didn't give it a second thought until I saw my power bills spike just after I set the thing up.


I don't know what you use, but in Windows XP, when you make the choice to turn off your computer, you can either restart it, turn it off completely, or have it in stand-by. For stand-by, it says that it "puts your computer in a low-power state so you can quickly resume your Windows session". Do you think it would use up little or no power that way? Keep in mind that I also have the computer, printer, speakers, monitor, and paper shredder all plugged into one of those six-way outlets that has to be turned on in order to work everything plugged into it. So even if the computer uses up no power in stand-by, the outlet is probably using up energy by just being switched on.

It depends on your computer, usually your motherboard specifically. Some older computers default to S1 standby mode, which is better than just leaving your computer running, but still relatively power-hungry. Check your BIOS to see if there's any mention of S3 standby mode.

Just about any electrical device will consume a tiny bit of electricity just by being plugged in, but I don't think it should be significant for the devices you mention except when they're actually in use.

[Storm Eagle]

Sorry about this, but just how do you go about checking your BIOS?

[Mynd Hed]

Sorry about this, but just how do you go about checking your BIOS?

It depends on your motherboard; the most common method is to hit either DELETE or F1 at a certain point during bootup. Watch for a message that says something like "Press DEL to enter setup" or something similar; make sure your monitor is already warmed up so that you don't miss it if it's early in the boot process. Also some motherboards are kind of finicky about the timing, so you might kind of have to pound the key a couple of times before it registers. Hope that helps.

While you're in there, you might want to check to see what your boot order is; I got my comp to boot a lot faster by having it boot from the hard drive straight away instead of checking the floppy and CD-ROM drives for bootable media first. Just be sure to make a note of what the original settings were in case you screw something up (most motherboards will give you the option of restoring the default settings in any case), and don't forget to switch it back if you ever have reason to boot from another device!

The BIOS has a lot of those kind of handy settings that you don't necessarily think about every day squirreled away in there. It's definitely educational to look around its menus; just don't change anything you don't understand. (-:

[En Sabah Nur]

This topic is pretty cool considering Maximum PC this month issue has several pages on how to kame your PC use S3 standby mode and use low power consumption. Everything from making your USB mouse wake up the PC to turning on LAN (using static IP from a router) to wake the PC up. It even tells you how to map a Network Drive for an S3 mode. Very cool.

[Mynd Hed]

This topic is pretty cool considering Maximum PC this month issue has several pages on how to kame your PC use S3 standby mode and use low power consumption. Everything from making your USB mouse wake up the PC to turning on LAN (using static IP from a router) to wake the PC up. It even tells you how to map a Network Drive for an S3 mode. Very cool.

Yeah, actually that's what prompted me to look into it on my own machine. Maximum PC's a good rag, even if it does constantly make me want things I can't afford. (-:

PC Magazine also had an article a couple months ago on how to go about building a machine from the ground up for low power consumption, less environmental impact when you dispose of it, etc. Something I wish I'd taken a look at before building my current machine; I don't know that I'd want to sacrifice quite as much price : performance in the interests of greenitude as the example system PC Mag built, but there are certainly things I could've done different that wouldn't have cost that much extra.

[En Sabah Nur]

Yeah, actually that's what prompted me to look into it on my own machine. Maximum PC's a good rag, even if it does constantly make me want things I can't afford. (-:

PC Magazine also had an article a couple months ago on how to go about building a machine from the ground up for low power consumption, less environmental impact when you dispose of it, etc. Something I wish I'd taken a look at before building my current machine; I don't know that I'd want to sacrifice quite as much price : performance in the interests of greenitude as the example system PC Mag built, but there are certainly things I could've done different that wouldn't have cost that much extra.Well, I swear my Maximum PC today, PC magazine became an electronics magazine, not focusing on PCs but technology in general. I want a PC and nothing but mag. I used Maximum PC advice and built an $1,500 Media Center PC that is off the hook. I can build PCs without problems, but when a mag tells you what parts to buy, it gets much easier since the parts they recommend are very good since they tested then and a lot of them were reviewed. Like this month with the CableCard technology from ATI. Very good read.

[Mynd Hed]

Well, I swear my Maximum PC today, PC magazine became an electronics magazine, not focusing on PCs but technology in general. I want a PC and nothing but mag. I used Maximum PC advice and built an $1,500 Media Center PC that is off the hook. I can build PCs without problems, but when a mag tells you what parts to buy, it gets much easier since the parts they recommend are very good since they tested then and a lot of them were reviewed. Like this month with the CableCard technology from ATI. Very good read.

Yeah, I'm letting my PC Mag subscription lapse because it seems more geared toward the business crowd than the enthusiast crowd. It's too bad, because their reviews of certain things like video cards and other gaming-centric upgrades could be a little more realistic about whether the sorts of performance gains you're getting for ultra-high-end gear are really worth the price premium than Maximum PC (which I sometimes think should be called "Trust Fund Baby With an Unlimited Budget Magazine"; does EVERY desktop they review have to cost above five grand?), but I get tired of skipping past 3/4 of the pages of PC Mag every month because they're full of stuff I just don't care about, like printers, smartphones, and other business traveller-oriented stuff.