Comments on: Study: U.S. Companies waste $2.8 Billion Annually to Power Idle PCs

By: Fiona Cambell

Fiona Cambell — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:30:09 +0000

Sleep and hibernate are very effective solutions in office environments for users with a persistent relationship with the PC. It can, however, be very difficult for administrators to centrally configure power management. This makes it hard to enforce enterprise wide power and can lead to a high level of energy waste. Companies like 1E, Data Synergy and Verdiem provide software solutions that solve this problem. For instance Data Synergy’s (www.datasynergy.co.uk) PowerMAN product allows an administrator to remotely configure multiple power policies on a per-user, per-machine and even per-time basis. If necessary the policies can be enforced and, uniquely, the product includes a historical reporting feature that can measure success and highlight problems. The tool is proving very popular in larger organisations and in particular the public sector

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:46:16 +0000

The 2009 PC energy report has one major flaw. Turning the PC off each night requires booting the software each day – not a trivial amount of time. Allowing only 2 minutes of time to start the PC 4 days a week will incur a labor cost of $20 billion for the 108 million PC’s that were mentioned in the report. Therefore businesses can save $2.8 billion in electricity if they are willing to lose an additional $18 billion in wages. That is calculated at an annual salary of $50,000 per year fully burdened with fringe benefits. IF it takes 10 minutes to start the PC and software the labor cost soars to over $100 billion!!!

By: Rich Casto

Rich Casto — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 02:25:44 +0000

Most employees are instructed to NOT turn off their computers so that automatic updates (e.g. antivirus, software and operating system patches) can run at night so as to not affect their work during business hours. Since most new(er) computers have energy-saving modes, the actual energy “waste” is not as much as estimated.