Spending Money While You Sleep
I have taken on a new customer this week and they have an interesting business that deals with energy (gas and electricity), measuring consumption with smart meters and ultimately using less of it to reduce your carbon footprint and save money. They showed me a neat little box that measures the power being used by any device. They demonstrated this on their Dell desktop computers, which drew about 130 Watts in normal use. We then shut the computer down and I was amazed to discover that they were still drawing over 30 Watts. That adds up to a few tens of pounds per year to run a computer without even booting it up. For a single PC, that might not seem too bad but for a large organisation, multiply that by hundreds or thousands and you can see that quickly adds up to a lot of money for nothing.
I seem to remember someone from Microsoft saying that Windows Vista would use new power-saving features to bring power consumption down to about 1-2% of that required for normal operation when the computer is sleeping. That is certainly not the case on those Dell PCs, which were AMD Athlon CPUs and pre-installed with Windows Vista Business OEM. More like 30%, an order of magnitude greater than claimed.
I tried the same test on a "TiGra Networks Information Worker Desktop PC" and was pleased to discover the results were better. Lower power consumption of about 85 Watts during normal operation, despite having dual cores (Intel E6600), a fast 1066 MHz front side bus, 4Gb of RAM and a beefy add-on 3D graphics accelerator. When placed into hybrid sleep (S5 suspend), I recorded 7 Watts of consumption. Better than the Dells but still almost 10% of the normal power, nowhere near the claimed 1-2%. This does serve to confirm my own conviction that Windows Vista needs the right hardware to perform properly and it also shows that quality components do make a difference - we use Intel motherboards and CPUs and all other components are brand name and WHQL tested for maximum reliability and compatibility.
With energy prices soaring, it is easy to see how businesses waste a lot of money powering devices they are not even using. If you are interested in reducing your energy consumption and/or carbon footprint, check these guys out.