Green Earth Tech

Save PC Power Consumption, Fight Global Warming

Uniblue Research Labs is running a non-commercial project - Localcooling.com that let you save PC power consumption and control over your power-mode setting of your PC and directly present you information about how much energy your PC is consuming including power consumption of CPU, monitor, Graphic card, hard disk, fans, sound card etc.

Interestingly what relates PC with Atmosphere, according to localcooling.com - More than 30 billion kilowatt-hours of energy is wasted because many of us simply forget to shut down our computers when we're not using them. Even with a screen saver on, when you're not using it, it's STILL using up to 280 watts/hour of completely wasted power this power pumps out 1.5lbs of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere for every KWh. For very 24 hours that's 9lbs of CO2 every day and 3,285lbs per year. That's more than 1.6 tons of CO2 thrown up into the atmosphere just to keep one single PC working.

Unilabs is offering free desktop application to PC users to adjust their power settings of their PCs, which can also be seen in any Windows OS as Control Panel > Power Options, under which PC users can define as when to turn off Monitor, Hard Disk and Hibernate the PC etc., what different is its shows the power consumption of each your PCs major components like monitor, hard disk, graphics cards, CPU processor, other fans, sound etc. and estimated power usage of your PC.

Other options you could customize your power settings is, never to shutdown your PC when so and so (iexplorer.exe, winamp.exe etc.) application is running and never shutdown before your own timings of a day in AM/ PM. 

The Beta version application after installation predicts how much will you save based on past users data and stats.