Windows Vista and Global Warming

You must be wondering what is the relationship between Windows Vista and global warming. Since Vista’s hardware requirements are more than that of XP, you must be thinking that Vista contributes to global warming by spending more energy. Then you got it wrong, it’s the other way. Read on to find out how’s this possible.

Vista has got a number of improvements in efficiently utilising power. You can find those details here and I am not going to explain them further. But I am going to talk about something else.

Millions of PCs worldwide are running operating systems without advanced power management features needed for today’s environment. This includes Windows XP as well. Large number of these PCs are running continuously without any break. Needed or not these PCs are never shut down during the course of a day. The actual number of such PCs vary from organization to organization and it is a fact that these PCs waste large amount of electricity causing money loss and global warming.

But how can Vista solve this problem? PCs with Windows Vista can be forced into power saving modes such as sleep, hibernate etc. after a period of inactivity. Similar settings used to exist in previous versions of Windows as well. But those settings had to be done at individual PCs, thus making it impractical to implement in large networks. In Vista these power management settings are available in the form of group policies so that they can be configured and applied centrally on large number of PCs. See the picture below to locate these settings in Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)

Under Power Management you can see 30+ different settings related to sleep mode, power button action, hard disk, video etc. The picture below is a quick view of those settings.

Now let’s do a simple math.

Assume that you are managing a network of 1,000 computers each consuming on an average 100Watts power.

If these PCs are not used for 14 hours a day the total energy wasted would be = 14*100*1000 =1,400 KWh or 1,400 Units of electricity.

If power management is implemented total savings per year would be = 1,400*365 = 511,000 Units, that’s a lot of money and energy loss.

So my request to every system administrator reading this blog is to try out these settings in your network and save the world!

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