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Microsoft One Step From World's Greenest Company
An anonymous reader writes "According to this article, Microsoft is only a few lines of code away from becoming the greenest company on Earth."
From the article:
"Redmond should issue a software upgrade to every computer running Microsoft Windows worldwide to adjust each machine's energy-saving settings for maximum efficiency."
The author figures that the upgrade would affect 100 million computers and that the power cost savings could hit $7 billion per year. CO2 emissions would be cut by 45 million tons. But what about the impact on computing?
What about all the companies that enforce power management settings across their network that remove standby mode etc? And that's just one large example of all of the little situations which would partially negate this ignorantly large savings estimation.
Not saying it wouldn't help, but you don't force something like this down on a 5 year old OS. Now if they included some sort of detection system in Vista that adjusted accordingly, then that would be helpful for the next gen.
Number of non-mobile computers out there that support CPU frequency and clock scaling - Very few.
AMD has only had that on the market for desktop CPUs for 3-4 years (or less), and Intel has only had it on the market for 3-4 months (since the Core 2 Duo launch for the desktop). No previous Intel desktop CPU supported any power management of significance.
This is one of those aspects of hardware that can't be changed in software. If the hardware doesn't support it (and for a few more years, most machines won't, people overestimate how often the "average Joe" replaces his hardware, same for corporate users), no software update will do a thing.
If he's talking about suspend and hibernate - That stuff is disabled by default because it rarely ever works properly. Of all the machines I own, only one (My newest machine) can wake up from hibernation with 100% reliability. If Microsoft tried to force hibernation to be enabled on all users, they would have a massive lawsuit on their hands due to all the machines that can't handle it.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
What they should do is allow machine power settings to be controllable from an Active Directory policy object. Network admins would then have fine control of the power usage of their desktops.
That's not really trolling - Linux doesn't seem set up to save power. While there are packages like hibernate, it's not well advertised, and didn't get installed by default for me.
Vista already seems to have a more power-saving profile by default, I was surprised when I couldn't VNC into it a few hours after leaving. Turned out (when I physically got there) it entered the suspend mode. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway, hah!), the power settings are back at Always On.
Apparently unlike some I actually read TFA.
;-)
I don't see where Microsoft commented one way or the other. What we have is a blogger with an idea to inflict power saving modes on people. MS is *way* smarter than that.
It's one of the down sides to free speech on the internet - even people who have dumb things to say can be instantly (and globally) published.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Not to mention, a significant number (I'd say the majority) of the world's computers are, to a greater or lesser extent, running on managed networks where such things as power-saving settings are set by policy.
Well, on my 3year old mainboard, it certainly is.
Shut Windows down using a short touch on the power button (you'll see the shutdown window), and Wake-On-LAN does exactly nothing.
Shut Windows down with Start->Shutdown (still funny today) and WOL works.
Shut Linux down with 'halt', 'init 0' or 'shutdown -h now' and WOL works.
See my blog for my free opinions.
Changing just two settings on the average office PC will cut it's useage by over 50% on a daily average, yet hardly any office ever mandates that they be enabled
- Screen saver totally disabled in favor of DPMS suspend after 10 minutes of inactivity and monitor shut off after 15 minutes
- Set hard drives to spin down after 20 minutes of inactivity.
See how easy that was? It didn't affect your backup plan or anything else. The hard drive setting ALONE can save you 15% or more, especially if your office runs lots of applications over the network.
Your idea has a (perceived) flaw when it comes to reality. Example: All US Army PC's are now required to have screen savers that activate (w/approved password) after 10 min. of inactivity. Not necessarily a great idea, but the Army thinks it is so us folk that work for them have that capability enabled on our PC's whether we wish it or not. Heck, we can't even change the background via screen settings as that tab is disabled. Sigh... Cragen
I don't know if YOU'RE trolling, but wtf does "Linux doesn't seem set up to save power" mean? Novell's SuSE Linux comes will CPU frequency scaling and suspend to RAM enabled. My laptop battery consistently lasts LONGER on flights than my co-workers who use Windows. Besides all that, Linux is just the kernel, it has facilities for throttling CPU and disks sleeping, it's up to the packager to use them.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
It gets expensive replacing hard drives after a couple years of start/stop cycles.. one of the reasons you'll notice the hard drive setting is set to off by default after Windows 98.
We have an intiative here where I work, (1000s of seats). Turn computers off at night. This over the last couple months has saved a significant amount of power, much more that I thought it would. This has reduced our power bill (and not everyone is doing it).
The biggest thing MS could do, is to use the screen saver to black the screen (put monitor into standby aka orange mode). This would at least reduce screen power comsumption. Its amazing when roaming around the city, the number of default windows screen savers/login screens you see running all night.
I stand corrected, and having looked properly on the web, I have to agree. I was talking based on the distro I installed, which didn't install the power management packages for some stupid reason.
The blogger is advocating Microsoft forcing users to accept drastic changes to the way their PCs function. Because if "opting out" were easy, we'd all do it and there would be no savings.
However, it is quite simple to use group policy and scripting to make use of energy saving features and shut down PCs when they are not being used. I know, the school district I work for uses them.
We have over 1,200 computers in the district, and every one of them will power down its monitor after 15 minutes idle. We've had to disable hibernation because it doesn't work properly on older systems, but we are powering down hard drives after 30 minutes. At the end of the day, the only workstations not powered down are administration and IT--less than 50 total.
Something not mentioned in that article: MS hasn't been able to make hibernation and suspend 100% reliable, and they've had years to work on it. Now this guy wants them to force us all to use it. No, thanks. Maybe when he gets a CS degree and can fix MS's code so that all the energy saving features work right on every PC they encounter I'll consider it, but until then this guy needs to shut his trap about things he doesn't understand.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Turning off or powering down desktop computers at night would wreak havoc on most enterprises larger than 25 desktops. We use after hours to push updates, install new software, and perform other maintenance. Your costs for new hardware would also likely increase significantly as the most likely time for hardware to fail is on power up. If hardware is running it typically stays running and only fails on a change in power status. If you changed to this "Green Policy" you would need to update your enterprise during work hours which would reduce the productivity of your labor force (also expensive). I think this is a case os someone who doesn't know what their talking about trying to make interesting dinner conversation. It is annoying at best for those of us who actually work in IT for a living.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
I dual boot my HP laptop and I get 2.5 hrs battery life from my Mandriva Linux side where I get just over 1.5 hours on my Windows side (and the MS side is set to conserve battery life). Needless to say, I tend to stay on the Linux side. Peace Bear
A stranger is a friend you have not yet met.
What you describe is stand-by state. In hibernation the memory is dumped to disk and the machine turns off completely.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Ever hear of remote wake-up or ACPI? Even a Win98 box can be nudged out of Standby mode remotely. The network doesn't have to be fully operational 24 hours a day to receive updates and maintenance, and I doubt you're doing those updates and software installations every single night. If you are, you desperately need to rework your system because it's hanging on to life by a thread. I'm not talking about putting the computers involved in real-time processes, web servers, etc in sleep mode. That wouldn't make a lot of sense. But the dozens or hundreds of workstations the typical customer service department, the mail-room, and all the other clerical and administrative roles a large corporation has are completely unused after the employees leave and none of them except the management would ever have a need for logging in remotely. Not to mention in most of the offices I've worked in that had a Windows platform, usually NT 4 or 2000, all of the updates were run as a batch script when you first logged in. It required all of 5 minutes to complete and it gave you an excuse to go pour a cup of coffee on company time. And on a more cynical note, at least if the WSs were shutdown overnight that'd be 12+ virus- and crash-free hours not to have to worry about.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
You would be totally right, if Vista actually required a dual core 2.8ghz processor or anything close. Judging by the system requirements, that mini-ITX would do quite nicely.
This would be a great idea if Windows power management actually worked half decently. A lot of the Windows XP machines that I worked with crash when you put them into standby mode, and even more of them will not come back out of standby without an application hanging or a hardware device disappearing from the hardware profile until you reboot the system. I'm not sure if it's a problem with Windows itself or with the drivers that manufacturers are releasing (probably a mix of both), but it's certainly not something that I could rely on if I had open applications running when I was away from my desk.
I have a hunch that this blogger is a Mac user, and hasn't experienced how bad Windows power management can be. My Mac Mini comes in and out of sleep mode without any problems (as long as I don't have my HP printer plugged into it), but that's a lot easier for Apple to do considering that they more control as to what hardware and software goes on their systems.
You can still give DPMS the same inactivity time limit as the screensaver, resulting in the screensaver locking the account and the monitor turning off simultaneously.
I don't know where those system requirements came from, maybe magic fairy land. When I installed Vista on my Athlon 64 3400+ w/an X700Pro and 1gig of Ram it was slow. When I thought maybe RC1 would be faster, I installed it on my Macbook, still slow, on the same desktop with 2 gig of ram and an 7600GT still slow. When I upgraded the processor to an Athlon X2 4400 and the 2gig of Ram now ran dual channel and it was installed to Sata Drive, not as slow, but still not as fast as XP. Oh, and we tried it on an old 3ghz PIV Mobile and it would barely move. That machine had a Directx 9 graphics card too.
The perf of the RC2 build of Vista is fine on my 2.8ghz P4 with 1gb of ram. FUD, pure and simple. I'll never understand why people such as yourself feel it necessary to tell such blatent lies (that are so easily disproved), nor will I understand why people feel it necessary to mod such bullshit up.