How to Save Energy on Your Computer

Posted on February 24th, 2009 by Marck

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If you use your computer a lot, you may find that you’re spending a lot of electricity and draining precious minutes off your battery life. As computers become more and more powerful, their power requirements also increase. The good news is that computer manufacturers and operating system builders are also looking for ways to make computers use less electricity. Here are some ways that you can save energy while using your computer.

Managing Power Options

If you use a notebook computer, you can manage how much power your computer uses by adjusting power management options. Power management differs between operating systems:

Windows XP

Right-click the battery icon on the taskbar. If the laptop is plugged into AC power, right-click the plug icon.
Click the “Adjust Power Properties” option.

laptop

From here, you’ll see a dialog box tabbed on “Power Schemes.” From here, you can tweak the power options to your preferences.

Windows Vista

Right-click the battery icon or the “Battery Charging” icon on the taskbar.
Windows Vista offers three default power settings for a laptop: “Balanced,” “Power Saver,” and “High Performance.” Click on “Power Saver” if you plan to power your laptop with the battery for an extended amount of time, but you get good battery life from the “Balanced” power option.

Macintosh

Click on the Apple menu and go to “System Preferences.”
Click “Show All,” and click on the “Energy Saver” icon on the Hardware bar.
Click “Show Details,” and tweak the battery settings for both the power adapter and battery power. Move the sliders around until you get the preferred custom power-saving settings for your Macbook.

Tips and Tricks

Use a screen saver. Screen savers help preserve the working lifespan of your screen, and allow it to use less electricity than having the screen turned on all the time.
Set standby, sleep, and hibernate settings. The spinning motion of the hard drive platters also takes up power. Standby, sleep, and hibernate settings temporarily slow down or stop the movement of the hard drive and draw memory access from RAM.

Computers have high energy requirements, and it pays to save every bit of wattage you can to keep your electricity bills low, and to preserve the lifespan of your notebook computer.