You want to do your part to save energy while lowering your electric bill, but how? Keeping your computer in standby or sleep mode is a great start. Unfortunately, Windows sometimes inter¬prets network activity or other signals from your pe¬ripherals as reasons to keep your system wide awake.

To nudge Windows toward the land of Nod, try C02 Saver (Find iton the April issue OVO; see the screen shot above) from Snap. com-the Cus¬tom Power Saving dialog box of this freeware tool has a check box that does just that. It also sits on your desktop and reports how much carbon dioxide you (and others) have saved this way. C02 Saver includes a configurable Web search bar, but it routes search data through Snap's servers for Snap's own uses, so I avoid it.