POWERSAVE™ – Another Green ITS Project

Did you know that a typical desktop PC with a 17-inch LCD monitor requires about 100 watts—65 watts for the computer and 35 watts for the monitor. If left on 24x7 for one year, this same computer will consume 874 kilowatt hours of electricity—that’s enough to release 750 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the equivalent of driving 820 miles in the average car!

This summer we installed Power Save software on everyones PC desktop. There will no longer be a requirement to shut-down your computer every night (although you can still do so if you want), thus reducing the amount of time it takes to get started in the morning or even after a meeting or a break. We strongly recommend that you do a reboot once a week just to keep your software updates current.

Effective August 2010, the Power Save application will have your monitor will go into Power Save standby mode after 15 minutes of no mouse or keyboard activity. After 45 minutes of no activity, your CPU will go into Standby mode as well. If you use Kea, or CRT while these programs are active, Power Save will not take effect. There will be a 60 second notice that a click of the mouse or keyboard will stop it from going into standby mode. If you come back and your monitor is black, all you need to do is power on your computer and login; you will be back where you were before. If your documents from a network drive such as the F:\Drive are in “read only” mode after Power Save, contact the IT Service Desk at 250-852-6800 as there is a quick fix to resolve this situation.

Power Save's non-disruptive computer energy management analyzes CPU, disk, keyboard, mouse, and application activity before taking power management actions. It is available for both Windows and Mac computers. With an average savings of $25 per computer per year for every computer deployed, Power Save is the ‘green’ software solution for desktop computers.