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?

Comments

It Wouldn't Affect Computing At All

[Anonymous Coward]

People who need better performance would change the settings. The vast majority of people don't need better performance. The vast majority would be okay (performance-wise) running a slightly souped-up C128 with GEOS and the Wave.

Home PC/Mac Power Consumption

[lancejjj]

I figured out that my PCs were consuming more electricity than my fridge, dish washer, and clothes washer. Combined.

I made a chart of actual electricity use of various PCs and Macs on my blog: PC and Mac power consumption.

In a nutshell, my annual power consumption went down by 30% (!) once I started to power down my home-built "home server PC" when not in use.

I also figured out that when buying a new PC that is going to see a lot of use, power consumption should be a factor. If you're saving $100 in purchase price, but spending $50/year for additional electricity because the cheap PC's power supply is grossly inefficient, well, have you really saved anything if you keep that machine for 3 years? The short answer. NO.

Short hardware life is bad for the enviroment

[SgtChaireBourne]

Hardware is toxic and energy intensive to produce and to dispose of. MS pushes a short hardware upgrade cycle, aiming to get its customers to make new hardware purchases every two years or so. Remember not only do later versions require newer hardware, eventually out-growing old hardware, most of MS' income is from Windows sales and nearly all of that is from OEM sales. Thus, MS is economically dependent on a short life span of units with unreasonably large ecological footprints.

Say the ecological footprint of hardware is the same over time.

• A 3 yr cycle, instead of a 2yr, is about a 30% reduction in ecological impact
• A 4 yr cycle, instead of a 2yr, is about a 50% reduction
• A 5 yr cycle, instead of a 2yr, is about a 60% reduction
• A 6 yr cycle, instead of a 2yr, is about a 70% reduction

You get the idea. Or ...

• A 4 yr cycle, instead of a 3yr, is about a 25% reduction in ecological impact
• A 5 yr cycle, instead of a 3yr, is about a 40% reduction
• A 6 yr cycle, instead of a 3yr, is about a 50% reduction

A 3, 4 or 5 year hardware cycle is perfectly reasonable, unless the software/operating systems gets so slow and bloated that performance suffers. Or unless the vendor stops supporting the software or operating system and their is no way to get third party or home grown support. So, MS-enforced hardware upgrades are definitely not green.

Anyway, the blog (it's not a real article) is way off base about energy consumption. Shame on /. for pushing MS' hype.

MS' coding practices make the company un-ecological: As the blog points out, currently, most MS machines get left on 24/7 (or as close to that as possible) to allow crackers to get in -- I mean to allow the system administrators to push out patches on "patch tuesday" or whatever it's called now.

Turning the machines off would also make them invulnerable to exploits, at least for the duration of the inactive period. Wake-on-LAN is an underutilized feature and could allow that. But it has nothing to do with any specific operating system.