If you think booting up and shutting down your computer negates the benefits of turning it off to begin with, or that your screensaver is saving you energy, get thee to Ted Samson’s rundown of five PC power myths and why they’re wrong. Save yourself and your company some cash and compute more sustainably by getting your computer’s power management in order.
One of the main development goals for Windows 7 is improving battery performance on laptop systems. Much of that is down to the manufacturer who builds the machine, but Windows 7 also includes a new command line tool for identifying power problems. As demonstrated in this morning’s WinHEC keynote, you can type powerconfig /energy duration:20 and generate a report identifying potential sources of power problems, ranging from poorly configured Wi-Fi to battery-draining background applications. While you can set shorter durations for the test, running for longer identifies more potential problems. The current public builds of Windows 7 don’t have lots of UI elements enabled, so it’s likely that there’ll be a friendlier front-end to this system before the final version arrives — but it’s still a nice tool for the power tweaker.
Budget Qantas offshoot Jetstar suffered an extended computer outage over the weekend, which was apparently due to a power surge somewhere in its network. While you won’t be forced to check in hundreds of passengers manually if your own power supply fails, it always pays to be prepared for unexpected power incidents. As I’ve noted in the past, a fully-charged laptop and a wireless broadband card can get you a long way when there’s no electricity around. If most of your key resources are in the cloud, heading to a net cafe can also be a good option. What other tactics have you used to deal with unexpected loss of power?
When I woke up this morning, the main power circuit in my house had died. This was bad news for my wallet and my productivity, as the power didn’t get restored until 2pm and I had a bunch of work to do. I had two laptops — a fully-charged ThinkPad and a half-charged Eee PC — and a wireless broadband card. Would they last until the electrician finished doing strange things in my bathroom?While it sucks being without power for an extended period, there’s an upside: it really makes you focus on what tasks you need to get done and what power management options you have.
