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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 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
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
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.
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.
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.