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SAVE CO2 EMISSIONS: Provide hibernate and resume time scheduling to save energy for business and home users

220 points posted to Environment by johnny 02/21/07

How about supplying some software or bios settings that can allow hibernation of a computer at a certain time and have it automatically resume at a certain time (without requiring the user to press the power button to resume).

For example, the company I work for requires we leave our PCs running when we leave the office, so software updates can be done.

This would save a lot of energy for businesses who need computers online for a small window (e.g. 2 hours) outside office hours to allow them to provide software maintenance, but not require the PC to be running all night unnecessarily using power.

Imagine the savings of greenhouse gases if all office desktops were not running for 8 hours in the evening for example.

This would also be useful for home users where they could configure their desktop computer to hibernate in the evenings and resume in the mornings. This would allow then to access their home computer from work or whilst on the road during the day using windows remote desktop. There are probably a large number of geeks that leave their computers running 24x7 at home, who could save energy.

The only issue I can think of so far with this idea is that antivirus software may not have a large enough window to scan files in the evening and therefore may end up resuming the scan when the computer resumes in the morning. This may only be an issue for users with lots of files.

johnny
02/21/07		 One other point is that the automatic resume time is needed, as some days I am not in the office and work from home (via VPN etc and windows remote desktop), so therefore I won't be able to physically resume my computer at the office in the morning by pressing a button on the front.
ashton
02/21/07		 Okay, political disagreements non-withstanding, this isn't nearly as great an idea as you think. Even computers, monitors and TV's that are turned off, can use up to 40% of their power, even more for suspended computers.

It'd be easier to have update software that can simply turn the computer off if it's late at night. Have a dialogue box that comes up, mentioning that the computer will go to sleep in 1 minute, giving the user the choice to interfere, if possible. Far more reliable than Hybernate and Suspend, which in my experience, has been very unstable (in Windows and Linux).
johnny
02/21/07		 In my original idea I was referring to hibernating the computer which AFAIK is pretty much a the same as shutting the computer down in terms of power consumption, not suspending it where it needs to power some components such as RAM to maintain memory etc.

Maybe as an addition to the idea DELL could provide a 110 or 240 V socket at the rear of the computer that is switched off (e.g via relay) when the computer is hibernated (or switched off) that the monitor plugs into to reduce power when the monitor is in standby mode. In fact on my desk, I have a number of peripherals that I want to completely switch off when I'm not using the computer, such as a printer, scanner, adsl modem, speakers power supply. It would be even better if DELL was able to design this switched socket so that it can handle (the load of) a power board (board with multiple outlets) plugged into it for all these type of peripherals.

This would provide additional power savings.
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