Not everyone can afford to install solar panels or get a new Prius this Earth Day, but there is a place where you can go green without spending an arm and a leg or radically changing the way you life: your computer. Chances are you spend most of your day sitting at the keyboard, and a few small changes can go a long way towards reducing its negative impact on the environment. As a bonus, you do your part for the environment, save money too. This Earth Day, we've rounded up some simple ways you can go green with your computer.
Turn off your computer without losing the advantages of a PC still on
Obviously, computers require electricity to operate, so close, sleep or hibernate the computer when not in use saves energy. Every modern operating system has its own parameters in order to maintain, so the first thing to do, if not open the power settings on your computer and place them for optimal use of energy. Set your computer to your monitor to sleep, slow hard drive, and put your computer to sleep when not in use. Even better, because the computer uses less power when hibernating than when sleeping, set your computer into hibernation instead of going to sleep.
One of the largest deviations (no pun intended) about the closure or sleeping your computer is that you will lose some of the best things on your computer while you are away. For example, if you download a large file, you can download to continue even when you're away. Similarly, we are dealing with a lot of ways to remotely access your computer, it will no longer work if your computer is off. Fortunately, you can continue using the computers these days, but still keep the rest of the time.
For example, Windows users should check the aforementioned WinOFF, which turns off, restart, and hibernate your computer (among others), after a certain time, at any given time, or when the CPU becomes idle so that the computer turns off automatically, sometimes you do not need.
If a download is what you expect, many peer-to-peer clients like uTorrent popular BitTorrent client can turn off your computer when a download is complete, so you can get your file and save energy as well.
Among WinOFF and built-stop shared by many applications, downloads, we treated the problem, but what happens when you want to access your machine remotely? If it is closed, you can understand, eh? In fact, it is possible, assuming you have set the Wake-On-LAN on your computer. When the Wake-On-LAN is enabled, you can connect your computer over the Internet from anywhere, so there is no reason not to turn off your computer when you leave the house.
Finally, if you're on a Mac laptop, check SmartSleep mentioned above to improve their energy saving options.
Save for printing
When it comes to the environment, one of the first places most offices can improve the stack of paper discarded from the giant network printer. In addition to obvious things you can do your own kind of double-sided printing, print the PDF preview before printing, or press the hundreds of copies of e-mail plaster on for the office, there are some tools that can minimize wasting paper and ink used during printing.
Save ink and paper when printing from your browser, use Firefox extension Aardvark already mentioned to change the page layout and delete items, such as ads and images that you do not need to print.
When you print on your browser, Windows users can save tons of paper and ink previously mentioned GreenPrint, a freeware, which automatically detects and removes unnecessary pages or space before it prints to the printer head.
If you are regularly sending documents back and forth to other persons or companies, you can also save a few trees and save a little 'time to develop, with a couple of hack office. For example, instead of going through the old print, sign and fax dance through the generations of our fathers, to try to create a digitized signature and then send the PDF file as a fax. It's faster and will save resources and costs.
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Now that you put good practices in energy use on your PC, it's time to switch to high-energy devices that you put in it. Whenever possible, you want to disable any device when you are not using it-like your printer or screen. Also, you should be aware of the configuration tools of your computer that gets its power supply (aka, vampire power) even when you turn off the device. Vampires commonly stand out as large, unsightly AC adapters.
While you connect your diligence for wall warts or keep them connected to a power strip to turn off when not in use, one can go further and automate the process with gadgets like the Energy Saving Smart Strip (original post) and Power Minder (original post), both monitors energy consumption of your PC and other devices automatically turn off when you turn off the computer.
More energy-saving computer, check out our top 10 energy-efficient computers.
Estimate the energy consumption
One thing to know your team sucks for a lot of energy every month, but the actual use of power units to the starting point. LocalCooling of Windows can install previously mentioned, a tool that helps you adjust Windows settings to save energy and see how much energy your computer uses. Some users have reported inaccurate measurements when the application was published about it, but the team still LocalCooling well-intentioned in their efforts to improve implementation and help you save energy and to visualize the impact of energy consumption.
If LocalCooling does not give you accurate results or if you want to get a more definitive to the power of computers, regardless of operating system, this Coding Horror post demonstrates in detail how to determine the lower leaves and using a computer (original post).
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