AN ENERGY-DEFICIENT world. every bit of saving counts. Reduce your pC's power consumption and become a green-conscious citizen of Planet Earth!
1: Go to and download the Local Cooling Application. It is free and reduces both your energy consumption and power bill. Once you download the small 3.5 MB file, go through a quick installation and select 'Run'. It presents four tabs - General, My power, Advanced and My Account. It lets you set times for screen turn-off, disc spin-down, and offers many other useful options. It also lets you see the hardware and corresponding watt consumption of each com¬ponent, to automatically optimize consumption. 2: Go to the BIOS setup program which is launched by pressing a particular key when your system first boots. often [Del] or [F2].

A SEE THE NUMBER of trees, and kilowatts you prompt should tell you what to use. Go to the Power Management menu which has an option called the ACPI Suspend Type or S3 Suspend Type. This setting governs how your PC handles being switched to Standby. Leave it in the default SI setting, and it still uses quite a lot of power when in standby. Change your suspend type to S3 and more devices will be switched off, while their status will be saved internally. This reduces standby power requirements by 50% or more.

3: Computer peripherals like printers, wireless routers, speaker sets, etc. use a lot of power, even when they are not being used. Put all PC¬related devices on one of those small 4-slot power strips or on a multi-socket plug. These things are always lying around the house some¬where. During the day have the computer set to hibernate if it has been inactive for 15 minutes and also switch off the power strip (which has the peripherals). The computer uses zero power when hibernated. It can come out of hibernation in just a few seconds. and switching on the power strip puts all the devices right back. and ready to go. This really is a good method to save electricity. Instead of putting your entire PC's load on the power strip, con¬nect only the small cables so you can shut them off at any time.

4: You don't need to leave your PC on all night to finish a task, or perform a scheduled backup. You can easily use the 'Schedule Tasks' feature in Windows Vista or XP to wake your computer from sleep mode if you want to perform a regular task like a backup in the middle of the night. If you leave your PC on at night just because you need to finish downloading a file, use the 'Auto Shutdown' add-on for Firefox. have saved after reducing your carbon footprint. 5: Decrease monitor brightness, remove CDs from the drive and unplug USB pen drives from USB hubs when not in use.

That way. the computer uses less power. Even screensavers use energy. Instead of seeing 3D flowers revolving within your desktop, set your system to sleep after 15 minutes. Less energy is used. Going one step further, you don't need to leave your system on all the time, think¬ing that repeated booting up and shutting down will use more energy. It doesn't. Leaving your computer on for 5 minutes or shutting down and restarting it will use the same amount of energy. Try to place your computer system near win¬dows or generally areas which are cooler. If the system is cooler it needs less internal cooling allowing it to run more efficiently and there is less power usage too. All these tricks will help keep your bill down.