Green Computing is More Than Sleep Mode

“Carbon footprint and sustainability is increasingly important
for all of us — so how does the ecological footprint of your
computing habits pan out?

“The simplest thing you can do is to make sure that your desktop
or laptop goes into sleep or standby mode when it’s not in use.
First up, make sure that you’re not using a screensaver, or there
will be little or no energy consumption difference between idle and
in use. Next, KDE and Gnome both have menu items where you can set
power preferences; or you can of course set things manually with
various XF86 options, hdparm, and so on.

“Next, consider whether you really need to leave your machine
running overnight. If you run cronjobs overnight, try changing the
timing to another lull time; or replace cron with anacron. You can
also set up automatic shutdown if you tend to forget to turn the
box off (I do). Both power management changes and overnight
powerdown aren’t just the green option, they’re also the cheaper
option: reduce your power bill!”

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