Screen savers are not saving you energy and unless you have a tired monochrome monitor, it's not helping to prevent permanent etchings on the screen either. The graphics-intensive screen savers, with your recent vacation photos and happy faces of your children are great, but it may be causing your computer to burn up twice as much energy and may be preventing it to enter sleep mode.
Sleep Mode, or Power Management features, can cut the energy used by your computer in half saving you between $25 and $75 a year.
Additional payoffs for utilizing Sleep Mode:
- Computer will not have to re-boot when you return to your daily tasks...Saving Time
- Saving energy uses less fossil fuels and is good for the environment...Reduced Pollution
- Reduced chance that valuable information will be displayed on your unattended PC...Increased Security
You will still be able to receive software updates such as antivirus definitions and security patches with the Power Management features activated since most software is pre-configured to apply these updates automatically and shortly after coming out of standby or hibernate.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends that your Sleep Mode be activated between 15 and 60 minutes of inactivity. The lower the setting, the more energy you'll save. You may want to consider setting your monitor to hibernate sooner and this will alert you that the computer is about to go to sleep. The "turn off hard disks" setting probably won't save you much, and can be ignored.
How do I activate Sleep Mode?
Go to the EPA's Energy Star .gov.au (Australia) web site for downloadable instructions and click consumers and enabling ENERGY STAR.
Saving energy is very cool, indeed!
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