Sleeping Computer: Energy Aware User - I

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: If you dont know what you are doing don't edit the registry. Also Urjas does not make any safety claims about any links and/or software listed here or otherwise. Please ensure compliance with your company's IT policies before proceeding

It is an established fact that energy management is the most effective method to save energy with minimal investments if any.

Putting computers to sleep is a very commonly unused energy management opportunity (EMO). Still  more useful & unused EMO is switching off computers overnight. While these facts have been around for quite some time now we will look into some of the common issues faced while implementing these EMO and their solutions.

First, most people dont know how to activate power management features. It is recommended to put the computer to sleep after an inactivity period of 10 mins and this Energy Star website beautifully list down the steps for different types of OS users.

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_power_mgt_users

It is quite inspirational to know that by putting laptops to sleep state, the consumption can fall down to just 3% from 60W to 2W. In businesses audited by Urjas, that could have saved up to 70% of the companies computer energy consumption (non IT Segment) and would definitely be worth an effort saving the environment if not lots of money.

However, another common issue faced is that the sleep mode is disabled/greyed out in older XP systems. This happens mostly due to conflicting video or other hardware drivers. The best solution is to ask your IT support to fix the driver. The second best thing is to edit registry setting to enable sleep mode and if you find that daunting enough ... this method on the forum shows a shortcut. 

Make sure you activate the your computer's power management options and unrelash the Energy Management Warrior inside you.