Companies Waste $2.8 Billion Per Year Powering Unused PCs

snydeq writes "Unused PCs — computers that are powered on but not in use — are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year, roughly equivalent to the impact of 4 million cars, according to report by 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy. All told, US organizations will waste $2.8 billion to power 108 million unused machines this year. The notion that power used turning on PCs negates any benefits of turning them off has been discussed recently as one of five PC power myths. By turning off unused machines and practicing proper PC power management, companies stand to save more than $36 per desktop PC per year."

Comments

Magic smoke

[Jurily]

Unused PCs computers that are powered on but not in use are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year

How exactly does that happen? What about the computers that are powered by a nuclear reactor?

I thought when CPUs emit smoke you have to buy a new one.

Re:Magic smoke

[ElectricTurtle]

You're forgetting that the method of environmentalists is to always assume the worst, then multiply that until it's newsworthy. Then claim it's 'scientific evidence' just because somebody made a computer model with values that don't actually exist.

Re:Magic smoke

[philipgar]

Actually, even the ones powered by coal are likely not wasting much CO2. Considering a machine is most likely to be sitting idle at night, and that the coal plants have to operate 24/7 (they can't dynamically lower their power output, that's provided by secondary sources during the afternoon). Power usage generally peaks in the afternoon, and so other power generation stations (those like natural gas that can be brought online quickly) handle the peak load, but, as coal power is cheaper, they try to get as much as possible from the coal. If the base load provided by the coal is greater than the power being consumed, than any additional power demanded isn't really "wasting" electricity. It's just using electricity that has already been generated. Of course, if this amount is great enough to change the power plants operating conditions, it does matter, and as far as the businesses are concerned, this power does cost money, and quite a bit of it.

However, saying the plant is releasing more CO2 for these computers is generally not true.

Phil

Re:Magic smoke

[Jurily]

PCs (or any other things) aren't connected to a specific power source. They're connected to a power grid.

(No whoosh for you.) So how is being connected to a CO2-emitting power source the computers' fault then?

Re:Magic smoke

[CarpetShark]

What about the computers that are powered by a nuclear reactor?

Is THAT what they're pushing as minimum spec for Windows now?

Re:Magic smoke

[sumdumass]

Umm you forgot that along with "scientific evidence", they also claim the consensus is in and the science is settled so if you question it, you either hate people or work for an oil company.

Re:Magic smoke

[jellomizer]

Exactly. Environmentalism will get more traction if they are honest about their data. We as a general population are use to hearing the doom conditions, as people are trying to push their agenda. So they do their computer models and give the results of the 4th standard deviation of the results.

The more truth is the fact if we reduce our power consumptions for the long term then the power companies can lower their output, as there is less demand. However the fact that your PC is on last night doesn't mean you PC is the cause of so much Carbon in the air. As it would still be there if you turn it off.

Re:Magic smoke

[hcdejong]

28.8 billion kWh/year is more than enough to 'change the power plants operating conditions'. A 125 MWe unit (the output of one generator of a nearby power station) delivers about 1 billion kWh/y, so shutting down all PCs at night would make a significant dent in the base load.

Re:Magic smoke

[Velska1]

Dude, you can shut down a PC at night, and get it running in the morning.

You can not, however, do the same thing with a power plant. It takes much longer to cycle up.

Anyhow, what we would need is a lot of high-efficiency photovoltaic panels, that would create the most power exactly when you have peak demand in the areas where solar is viable to begin with.

Re:Magic smoke

[PianoComp81]

What about the computers that are powered by a nuclear reactor?

It's still wasting company money. Who cares about how much CO2 is put out when really all the company really cares about is how much money they're wasting? For that matter, if we turned our computers off at home, we'd save money on our own bills. I know my power bill would probably be $20-$30 less if I turned my computer off when it wasn't in use.

Re:Magic smoke

[GauteL]

You are missing the point completely. The point is that if most businesses started switching off their computers at night, the power companies would most likely change their operating conditions.

It might make it less economically viable to maintain such a high base load during the night, meaning it becomes more profitable to shift some of the power production on the sources with a shorter power up/down cycle.

Educating companies about how much money they are wasting is likely to be far more effective than asking them to be green for the environment.

Re:Magic smoke

[alienunknown]

What about the computers that are powered by a nuclear reactor?

Is THAT what they're pushing as minimum spec for Windows now?

No, well except for vista.

Re:Magic smoke

[TapeCutter]

Deliberate misinformation and hyperbole is now insightfull???

Re:Magic smoke

[ahankinson]

Exactly! Like how Neo-Cons will get more adherents if only they used more facts.

Not everybody is driven by science or data. In fact, for a lot of people, putting numbers like this in front of them is the only way that they'll understand that they have an impact on the environment, whether it's empirically true or not.

Re:Magic smoke

[jellomizer]

Well there where always be a group of people that you will not convince. However if you are going to get the general population, I think responsible environmentalism is the key.

Re:Magic smoke

[hairyfeet]

Well, where I am at we get our power from a pair of nuclear reactors so I ain't worried about this too much. Couple this with the fact that one of my more popular services with my SMB customers is to set it up so they can log into their office machines from home if they don't feel like coming into work but want to get a little work done, and the fact that WOL can sometimes be iffy and having a PO'ed client bitching at you because he had to come into the office after a dentist appointment because for whatever reason WOL didn't actually wake, and you can see why I just advise them to leave the thing on.

Finally the PC I am typing this on is going on its 9th year without so much as a PSU change(only thing that failed was a HDD, and I killed it with overwork, pure and simple) and right next to it is a 5 year old gaming PC that I turn off nightly because of the fans, and it has gone through a mobo,PSU AND a HDD, and I think I'll just stick with leaving them on, thank you very much. I know that anecdotes aren't evidence but I have seen that my customers that leave theirs on simply don't need the amount of work that those that turn it off do. The ones that leave it on usually only ever need a HDD whereas I see a LOT of dead PSUs and mobos from the ones that cycle down nightly.

And since my customers are using their PCs to make money, having it work when they need it, even if that need comes up at home and the office is 25 miles away, is worth the extra expense to them. Of course getting our power from nuclear means its cheaper so that could be part of the reason they don't care. But in the end with my customers and I it all comes down to money. And if you figure in the amount of gas they save by not coming in when they don't have to, plus the extra waste that would have ended up in a landfill from parts dying due to cycling, I bet we are getting pretty close to break even. But just like that new solder that I truly believe will cost us much more environmentally due to the waste generated by failing parts than it save due to lead, so too do I believe that turning off PCs nightly will cost more in dead machines clogging up landfills than it will save by not using juice. I'd at least want to see some REAL numbers before I scream the sky is falling.

Re:Magic smoke

[necro81]

Electricity is a fluid commodity. Although long-distance transmission losses mean that power is consumed mostly near to where it is generated, I wouldn't make a blanket statement. The study is, after all, making generalizations about computers all over, which are powered by a mix of energy sources. So, the emissions attributable to them should take that mix into account.

In making these kinds of calculations, I'd just figure the energy makeup of the entire United States (or whichever country you prefer). For the U.S., nuclear makes up about 20%, natural gas another 20, coal about 50%, hydro about 7%, and other renewables about 2%. So, in figuring the carbon emissions for electrically-powered equipment, I'd say that for every Watt-hour, 70% of it produces carbon dioxide directly, and the other 30% can be discounted.

In other words, unless you want to talk about very specific cases (e.g. the off-grid guy who powers his home and computer from photovoltaics), no one is completely clean; everyone is about 70% dirty.

Besides, even if you want to declare your virtue by powering your idle computer from nuclear energy or magic fairy dust, do you really want to boast how clean your wasted power is?

Re:Magic smoke

[NeverVotedBush]

Why "5 minutes"? I would guess that if you turn off PCs after the workday and don't turn them back on until the next morning you save more like 15 to 16 hours of run time.

That's 960 minutes per day x 230 work days = 220,800 minutes. Or 3,680 hours per desktop per year. That's not counting in the 48 hours every weekend (52) which equals an additional 2496 hours, plus however many holiday days at another 24 hours each. If there are seven for whatever business, that's another 168 hours. And if the worker takes off two weeks each year, that's an additional 336 hours.

Grand total is 6,680 hours of wasted run time as an estimate.

For the people who run the fancy screensavers, the power used is fairly large. A blank screen is the best. That lets the monitor go into low power.

Re:Magic smoke

[NeverVotedBush]

You do realize there are consequences from getting your power from nuclear reactors and then wasting it, don't you?

Higher load means more reactors may need to be built, it generates more radioactive waste, heats up more water, raises the risk of accident, etc.

And since you are using nuclear fuel that much faster, more has to be mined and refined which adds to CO2 loading, chemical and radioactive chemical waste streams.

In addition, since the country is on a grid and utilities can flow excess capability into neighboring regions, you reduce that excess capability and therefore increase the amount of CO2 that some coal or natural gas-fired plant generates.

There are consequences for everything.

And sure, your computer or two doesn't make much of a contribution, but the more people that feel like you and also waste power adds up. That is the attitude that got us where we are now.

Re:Magic smoke

[SkyDude]

Deliberate misinformation and hyperbole is now insightfull???

Did you forget where you are?

Re:Magic smoke

[geekoid]

You need to balance that against time lost waiting for boot up and shut down.
a minute of a workers time is a lot more expensive then a minute of power.

obvious reaction

[rarel]

I'm at work, enviro-conscious, and I love my company. So I'll turn my workstation off right n

Re:obvious reaction

[daem0n1x]

It has nothing to do with loving your company. What people don't realize often is that wasting company resources affects those who work in it.

If the employees are wasting too much power, the money to pay for them won't be taken from shareholder dividends or executive incentives. It will come from salaries.

So, it's not about loving the company. Don't waste company resources because, in the end, it's YOU who pays the bill.

Besides, also think about the impact of waste on the environment.

Re:obvious reaction

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be so naive. You save the company money, you won't see a dime. Shareholder dividends and executive incentives expand to fill the available budget.

Re:obvious reaction

[sumdumass]

The story says $36 per desktop computer per year could be saved. Now that sound like a lot of money at a company with 500 desktops ($18,000). But that company will have at least 500 employees and probably more. At 10% more or 550 employees to work those 500 desktop computers, that brings the potential salary increases to about $32 a year. If the average person works 38 hours a week and 48 weeks a year (1842 hours), that's about a penny or less per hour raise.

But it gets even worse. The heat cycles of computers heating up when in use and cooling down when powered off will take a small toll on the life of the computer. So I guess the real question might be is if the computer lasts 2 years instead of 3 or 4 or even 5 years, how many of those would need to be replaced because the Co2 emitted from making the things from scratch outweighed the entire carbon savings from the $36 worth of electricity not in use assuming that the power for those computers don't already come from a Co2-less generating facility. My guess is that an early replacement on any of them will offset any environmental savings which sort of makes this idea more hand waving then anything.

Re:obvious reaction

[KDR_11k]

I'd say there's a good chance the computers will be obsolete before they fail. 3-4 years is nothing, if your computers fail that fast you should probably look into another vendor.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

[lobiusmoop]

I think the fundamental problem is that in the West, energy (specifically watts-hours of electricity in this case) have been so cheap in the last few decades as to be effectively free. This is changing now through worldwide recession and the depletion of the easy-to-get fossil fuel. Once electricity prices start seriously ramping up (which they inevitably will), companies will be giving their utility bills a lot more scrutiny.

Re:Familiarity Breeds Contempt

[arbitraryaardvark]

Once electricity prices start seriously ramping up (which they inevitably will), companies will be giving their utility bills a lot more scrutiny.

I suggest you look at photovoltaics and a little thing called Moore's law. Electricity will be cheaper in the future than in the now. Of course, conservation, including automagically turning off unused computers, is still the best buy. But my computer stays on. 8 months out of the year, it's an efficient electric heater. 2 months out of the year, it's an undesirable heat source and i might turn off the monitor at night if i think about it. The article, not that i read it, didn't seem to account for the heating value of the "wasted" electricity. In most of the country most of the time, electric heat is a pretty good buy compared to natural gas, coal, oil, firewood, personal nuke, whale oil, or other options.

Productivity

[sakdoctor]

I could lose $36 worth of productivity in a few days. My desktop and servers stay ON.

Re:Productivity

[worip]

No, because logging on, firing up applications and development environments, opening any projects/files that you are working on takes time. Say conservatively 10 mins per day. That is 50 mins per work week. That is almost an hour of my time a week - already exceeding the cost of the energy (depending on your hourly rate of course).

Re:Productivity

[FridgeFreezer]

Yes and no, true thermal cycling does cause marginal components to fail but by leaving the thing on all the time rather than the half of the day you're actually using it you're halving the "useful" life of the thing anyway.

There is a balance between leaving it on 100% of the time and switching everything on and off every time you walk from your desk to the coffee machine and back.

Re:Productivity

[Zebedeu]

Never heard of suspend? Hybernate?

Re:Productivity

[zehaeva]

even if you assume 1min per day to turn on you've got 20min per month. depending on your pay grade you maybe at that 36 dollars a month(200k/yearish). if you throw in having to download a profile from the server and security scripts running, even a an increase in that time of getting the computer to a usable state, say 3min per day, nets us 60min to month so that expands to people making err 70k a year? Automated off and on systems to prime the systems before the employees get in would be best. but how much to develop that? cost/benefit analysis always interests me.

Re:Productivity

[lauwersw]

Don't tell us you're reading /. from home, we don't believe you. That will cost you at least 10 minutes a day as well...

Turning PCs into a grid

[jw3]

Of course, this solution is not for everyone, but it works quite nice at the university where I'm working. Three departments (chemistry, biology and physics) got together to form a computer administrative unit. Essentially, any workstation at one of these three dpts has the same version of OS (mostly Windows) with the same software installed. And each of these installations includes condor for distributed computing. Effectively, you get something comparable to a 1000+ nodes cluster -- and some of the machines are quite strong!
Scientists and students alike are allowed to use it freely for their computations. There is a batch submission system, and a whole lot of numerical calculations run on these computers during night. There are a few caveats, though:

• many biological applications need a large amount of data -- and the moment that you need to transfer gigabytes to each of the nodes (as they do not share storage) the whole thing is no longer reasonable.
• you always have to take into account a 1-5% job loss, so if you want e.g. 1000 simulation runs, you should dispatch 1200 runs to be on the safe side. The job loss comes from a) machine being switched off b) machine having all sorts of random troubles (disk full, some weird software interaction) c) some jobs take awfully long to execute, so when 99% of your other jobs are done, you just need to kill the others.
• Sometimes you rather launch the job locally and wait two days rather then spend half a day on preparing and testing the batch submission and get the results next morning (my time is more valuable than the CPU time...)

All in all, you get lots of CPU, but low reliability. Which is fine for many applications. Additionally, not only you prevent energy wastage, but you also use the hardware more efficiently (so that the brand new quad core of the dpts secretary actually gets used in a reasonable way).
By the way -- our admins hate it, when Windows computers are being switched off. They run the updates at night, as during the day the users are likely to stop an update that takes to long. I was being bashed for switching off computers during night :-)
j.

Re:Turning PCs into a grid

[terraformer]

You are absolutely wrong. A system like that is the exact opposite of efficient if you are leaving the PCs on *solely for the purposes of the cluster*. Grid computing is only efficient when you take what is under utilized and put it to work. The energy in any PC (server or desktop) can be split into two parts. Overhead and active. All of the overhead is what the PC consumes when it is idle (~0% utilization). All of the active is the power between idle and max consumption. On your typical desktop PC, more than 60-70% of the energy is wasted overhead (conversion losses and platform power). By amortizing that overhead between TWO tasks, and putting the CPU/GPU to work when sitting there idle, you are far more efficient than when simply at idle. ie; You are still benefitting from the idle by having a ready PC to compute your next command AND the work performed for the cluster. But you are not more efficient per work unit than a super computer with it's low relative overhead when only running ONE task, the cluster computing. This is because super computers have more overhead but they can amortize that overhead over a large number of CPUs with a high compute capacity.

Re:Turning PCs into a grid

[jw3]

The computers are not being left *solely* for the purposes of the cluster. The policy of the university admins is to leave them overnight for updates, and anyway the users don't like to turn them off (so they don't have to wait for the computer to boot up in the morning). Therefore we are utilising what sits there idle anyway. Furthermore, anyway you don't take into account the overhead of buying a supercomputer / cluster with 1000+ nodes in the first place -- and we are utilising what has already been payed for (both in terms of money from the university and in terms of energy used / CO2 emission that took to produce the units). Finally, buying a supercomputer / cluster is, due to the necessary bureaucracy involved in expensive investments, a major pain in the ass and also a system-administrative effort.

Of course, this solution cannot replace a proper cluster -- I have already outlined why, and also I agree with you in puncto efficiency. But if you have a bunch of PCs sitting around idle at night, and need calculations -- this may be a cheap and quick solution.

j.

Re:Turning PCs into a grid

[walshy007]

1. paragraph tags make posts as long as yours easier to read, for future note

2.Your essential point is it's more efficient to use one presumably NUMA supercomputer to complete a task, which may or may not be the case depending on the supercomputer and the task given, but the point is.. they don't have a supercomputer, and likely don't have the funding for one.

Using their spare pc's at night in a clustered environment would be one of the most cost-efficient things they could do in so far as hardware purchasing, considering they already need and have the pc's setup in the right configuration

we don't all have a 128-cpu onyx 3800 gargantuan tower sitting in our closets for this kind of computing, we do tend to have at least a few relatively fast desktops available which would otherwise be off or idling.

Re:Same here

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd really like to put the pc to sleep after 5 mins and to hibernation after 15.

But give me a pc that won't die on this, and I'll do it.

BUY software to shut down a PC??

[LoadWB]

The ROI article mentions a product which you BUY to shut down your PCs.

I have a free solution:

shutdown -s -t 0 -f -m

You can schedule that at your server to force all computers to shut down at a specified time.

Something along the lines of

for /f "skip=3 tokens=1 delims=\" %m in ('net view') do shutdown -s -t 0 -f -m %m

Now, you could be nice and change -t 0 to something like -t 45 and give any poor sucker at a terminal a chance to shutdown -a, or at least close programs. (There will be one error at the end for the success notice.)

I do not recommend using that on a network without some tweaking: it will also shut down servers which show up in net view. Just a basic idea, and I do use a modified version of it at a couple of sites.

Even a scheduled wol.exe could run to make sure computers are able to run updates overnight.

Or you could push out a group policy that forces suspend after an hour of inactivity, and sets Windows Update to wake the computer to run. No fuss, no muss.

Now, what did all that cost us?

Re:BUY software to shut down a PC??

[totally bogus dude]

Not so good with Vista though, as the warning dialog appears in another desktop. Part of that secure desktop thingy for UAC prompts and the like. You get a program appear in the taskbar but unless you actually notice it and click on it you'll never know your PC is about to shut down.

Your basic point is correct though, but I think a lot of organisations prefer to buy stuff than have in-house staff capable of writing even simple scripts like this. Presumably it's for the same reason they'd rather pay some consulting company loads of money to build an SOE we could've done ourselves: if it's outsourced to a high-priced company, it must be better!

I didn't RTFA, but does the product they're suggesting produce pie charts? That's probably the answer.

Dumb Terminals

[Bert64]

Use dumb terminals, something like sunrays...

Configure them to shut off when idle instead of run a screensaver, when you power it back on it boots pretty much instantly and the user can re-enter their password (or reinsert their smartcard) and be back where they were, all the session state is stored on the server.

No need to keep machines on overnight for updates, because the terminals are dumb enough not to need updates...

Dumb terminals boot instantly, so no need to keep machines pre loaded to save booting time.

Put a power breaker by the door, last one out can turn the breaker off, first one in can turn it on (they used to do this in our computer labs at college)... There shouldn't need to be anything turned on in an office when there's no people there.

Re:Dumb Terminals

[RAMMS EIN]

It's sad that it's so easy to come up with ways to save power, but so few places and people actually implement them. I even have a colleague who refuses to turn off his computer, because "a 100 W more or less doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things". He's right about that, of course, but what he and many others don't realize is that doing the little things can actually affect the grand scheme of things. I, for example, use less than half as much electricity as the average household around me, simply because I use energy-efficient products and turn off most things when I'm not using them. It's not a lot of trouble, but if everybody did it, we could easily halve the power consumed by households!

Re:Dumb Terminals

[Samschnooks]

It's not a lot of trouble, but if everybody did it, we could easily halve the power consumed by households!

Actually spend the time to turn things off?! I spent too much time turning them on! You're asking too much! It'll take away time from my Jerry Springer!

I, for example, use less than half as much electricity as the average household around me, simply because I use energy-efficient products and turn off most things when I'm not using them.

What! Save?!? Save energy!?

Let me tell you something you tie-died tee-shirt Birkenstock wearing Prius driving hippy pinko! This is America! WE don't conserve! We don't have to! We get our oil cheap. As far back as I can remember, October or so, oil has never been expensive and there's ALWAYS been plenty of it! And let's say, for the sake of argument you hippies are right and that the oil will run out. We'll drill for more! Drill baby drill! That's has and always will solve our energy problems.

**Grumbling while going for his morning BUD**

Pinko hippy liberal! Conserving energy!

***Yells to wife**

Is Sean or Rush on yet!

Re:Dumb Terminals

[Abcd1234]

He's right about that, of course, but what he and many others don't realize is that doing the little things can actually affect the grand scheme of things.

Why do you think so many people on the right ridiculed Obama when he stated that part of his energy plan was to get people using more efficient lighting?

Simply put: people are stupid. No, really stupid. And so they don't understand the large aggregate effect you get from a lot of small changes.

Re:Dumb Terminals

[Bongo]

if everybody did it, we could easily halve the power consumed by households!

I agree with you if you look at it that way. But our world is far more varied and complex, and not everyone is like you. My carbon footprint happens to be tiny (one room apartment, never owned a car, work locally, haven't flown anywhere in 10 years, no kids.) But all those things are for other reasons. Try to change people so that they make a real noticeable savings in energy, like we can start turning off power stations, and it becomes very very tricky. It is like we think we are the first generation to ever think about conservation, when actually every generation has had to deal with supply problems for resources, and the world we have today is the best that they could achieve. Turning off a few things is obviously to a lot of people just a symbolic gesture. Like now they charge for carrier bags at the supermarket to encourage people to reuse the bags. I was already re-using the bags for trash and now that they charge for them, I have to buy trash bags instead. Actual saving: zero. Except the supermarket gets to waffle on about the environment and their "green" image.
I was taught in Building Science that yeah, you could send people all round the county installing insulation, but the energy used sending all those trucks around, and the cost, would not be regained for 50 years (or something on that order) given what the insulation actually saved.
Technological progress is what has taken us forward, and that's not going to change. We need technology more than ever now, in order to lighten our footprint. Reducing consumption simply leads in the end back to more primitive technologies, which are more environmentally harmful. In the meantime please do enjoy your savings on the electricity bill as I do mine.

Re:PC power management sucks...

[Sycraft-fu]

Something is wrong with your PC or its setup. There is no reason it should draw more than a small trickle when shut down. Mine measures 0 watts when shut down. Now it isn't actually zero, the PC does draw a tiny bit unless I throw the hard switch on the powersupply, but that means it is less than a watt. That's how it should work when actually shut down. There is only a tiny bit of power drawn for things like charging the battery and the ability to do wake-on-LAN and such. 19 watts sounds like you have it suspended or something. Where it has shut down a large part of its components, but is still running in a low power state (RAM is being refreshed and such).

So this isn't a PC power management problem, this is a problem with your particular PC.

Screensavers & ET

[Anonymous Coward]

Can everyone please turn off their fucking screensavers and just configure your screen to blank out, your monitor to shut off, and suspend the computer if you can too?

Hey geniuses-- there's no point to having your CPU heat up the planet when you create CO2 to run the AC to cool down a room heated by a CPU which is burning fossil fuels to show some stunning complex 3d imagery to absolutely no one in an empty fucking room.

Thanks.

(Oh, and by the way-- SETI@Home is a bullshit waste of time too. It's not like the rest of us are burning vats of gasoline in our backyards to summon unicorns, so please don't fuck up my planet with your random wild-stab-in-the-dark geektard fantasies either. Let's do the math. Odds of SETI@Home finding ET: Who the fuck knows? Odds of SETI@HOME helping to fuck up planet: 100%. Stop it.)

Re:Half an hour a year?

[telchine]

what exactly are these programs doing which takes such an incredible amount of time before they become useful?

Initializing DRM layers, generating transparent overlay effects, decreasing the spin speed of the hard drive and generating a nice Vista logo on the desktop.

Vast underestimation

[tygerstripes]

This doesn't take into account the vast, vast amount of time, energy and resources wasted by people who don't know how to use the fucking things properly in the first place. Let's start there before we get to titivating with power-management.

I've lost count of the number of times I've had to show people how to do the simplest things, to save them hours of wasted effort each week. This usually leads to me writing explicit instructions and disseminating to those concerned but, ultimately, people just don't care (and I have trained people for a living with notable success, so it's not a "techie-personality pissing people off" thing).

Power-management? How about education. If every office-worker were to spend one day a year going through their daily grind with someone sat beside them who knows how to use their PC's potential (and how to explain it), productivity would double. I'm not just slagging off my luddite colleagues here; I know there are things I could do better, and would genuinely welcome the attention of someone who could show me how.

Sorry to vent my frustrations here, but it's that or do it at work. To put it bluntly: nice study, but frankly you're just pissing in the ocean.

On the reg yesterday...

[fprintf]

So this was on the Reg yesterday, and the comments were all virtually the same, on two variations:

1. The company has to pay people to sit around while PCs power up and down, eliminating any benefit from powering down the PCs since people are so much more expensive.
2. The company pushes updates and such automatically at night when computer/network usage is low, making it less expensive (again, saving money over power saved) than pushing the updates when people turn on their computers in the morning.

I turn most of my computers off at home and work because I hate wasting the power, and I have a problem with my home PC keeping the fan on in sleep mode. On my laptop I put it in sleep mode, plugged into the wall. I have no idea how much power this uses, but I do it so that I get a quick restart in the morning for checking slashdot @ breakfast. It bothers me that I might be wasting a few dollars per month keeping it in sleep rather than hibernate (which doesn't work on my machine - Ubuntu on a IBM T30) or full shutdown.

Re:Half an hour a year?

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

Reticulating splines?

:)

More co-operation from BIOS manufactures

[Air-conditioned cowh]

As a Linux user I am used to laptops and desktops never quite working because the BIOS power management only works with Windows.

There are two possible reasons for that. One is that the open source software hasn't been written yet to take advantage of published APIs or, another possibility is that the manufacture is hiding it's APIs to make it really difficult to use anything except Windows to manage the system power.

If it is the latter then in it seems to me highly irresponsible on the part of the hardware manufactures. How to save energy when their hardware is not being used is really not something to be hiding for any reason these days.

I realise I don't exactly represent a significant number of users here. I'm just thinking in terms of what I can do to save energy at my own desktop (apart from the obvious switching stuff off when not in use!) and what's in the way. And Windows-centric BIOS's seem to be the main culprit.

I wonder how many of these computers...

[billius]

are malware-laden Windows boxes at small businesses with little or no regular IT Staff. I did contract IT work for small business a while back and some of the computers I had to deal with were borderline unusable. In some cases, a full reboot meant a full 15 minutes before the computer was in some semblance of working order again. That's definitely enough time to make a less savvy user want to just leave the thing on overnight and only shutdown/reboot when you really had to. And of course many of these folks didn't want to hear about how their super-awesome toolbars were the root of the problem.

Re:Half an hour a year?

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

Yikes... so I guess the issue here is an IT department gone crazy? Or, at the very least, a system implemented by IT staff who are either completely lacking the proper knowledge or lacking an idea of what it is like to use this system in the "real world". Either way, it doesn't sound like much fun to use...

And LDAP: it's a light directory system, useful for storing information about users. Passwords, names, contact info... stuff like that. Can't say what in particular your system is using it for, but it's clear that your IT people haven't set it up for single sign-on since you have to log into several different programs.

Re:Half an hour a year?

[daem0n1x]

That's why I use hibernation. It takes one minute to shutdown and another to startup.

s2disk hibernate + WoL or scheduled wake-up w/BIOS

[olden]

Ouch. Dude, if you need to lose 15 to 20 minutes (let alone 45) to restart your PC, something is terminally wrong with your setup. Vista on a 486?
Even in such pathological case, wouldn't suspend or hibernate be an option?

I always power down my (work or home) PC when I expect to not need it for a while. Initiating hibernation takes me 2 seconds, resuming 30 to 40s in the rare instances when the machine is not already up again by the time I get back to it, or if I need to VPN into it.

I'm using Linux (Ubuntu 8.10, doesn't matter much), shutting down via 's2disk'. Basically, it's hibernate, ie all applications etc are saved to disk in whatever state they happen to be, no need to exit any etc...
s2disk uses compression by default, so while it may take a bit longer for the machine to actually finish writing everything to disk and power down (who cares), resumes are /fast/.

Powering back up is usually triggered via the BIOS' RTC alarm, scheduled every weekday shortly before I'm expected to arrive at work. Worst case (say I'm there early), my PC is ready with all my apps running in less than 40s, time I may need anyway to check my voicemail etc.

Remote access via my company SonicWALL SSL-VPN is also a breeze, since this gateway can issue Wake-on-LAN to whatever one wants to get to.

Reducing waste in general is IMHO just being responsible.
"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."

Not convinced - but what about Sleep Mode?

[LordHaart]

I don't think that this is in the company's best interest. $36 a year is 10c a day, and even if the machine boots in 1 minute, that's ~$20/60 = 33c of wasted employee time. So there's not that much incentive (carbon trading may change this). I'd be interested to see the effect of Sleep mode, however, as that boots much faster.

Re:Half an hour a year?

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

As annoying as all these useless background and systray apps are, isn't this as much the fault of lazy IT departments as it is the companies which produce these programs? And from all these comments, it would seem this is a problem with *many* IT departments.

Why do the IT people leave all of this stuff on? I have to assume if people complain about it so much that they can't take it off themselves otherwise they would have long ago. So why can't IT be bothered to properly configure the machines they maintain?

Surely most IT depts. configure one machine and ghost/clone it to others for backup and replication purposes and to prevent duplication of work. It's even less forgivable to not get rid of these apps if you only have to do it once.

Displayed at home regularly here

[smchris]

When my wife bangs her mouse around at home complaining it takes so long for the "screensaver" to give back her desktop. Clearly, the place she works hasn't set any power saving on their machines or she would know what is going on. I believe with about 500 employees at their peak last year, maybe they could have fired a couple fewer on their recent rounds of layoffs if they had actually used power saving.

Re:s2disk hibernate + WoL or scheduled wake-up w/B

[mokus000]

I can tell you from experience in a large security-conscious organization that such pathological setups are not nearly as uncommon as you seem to think. The combination of antivirus and extremely aggressive login scripts bring fairly modern hardware with XP Pro to its knees on startup.

When I or any of my coworkers have to cold boot, or often even just whenever we dock an already booted laptop, it means a minimum of 5-10 minutes enforced coffee break. If you're actually in a hurry to get something for someone standing in your office, it can sure seem like 30 min.

The worst is when it boots up and tells you 10 minutes later that it's done installing some software update the login scripts had for it, so now you need to reboot. Or rather, that it's going to reboot in 30 seconds, and there's nothing you can do.

Re:I didn't really get this at first.

[Migraineman]

I disagree with that last statement. I'm doing some embedded development right now, and I leave my machines on overnight intentionally. Powering up the entire system to the point where I can continue from CoB yesterday would take 30 minutes or so. I'd chew through that $36-per-year savings in a few days, possibly one day if I'm working at a customer's site running at my external-billing rate rather than my internal rate.

And no, I can't just go get coffee while the machine boots itself. The applications interact with the target, and get completely hosed if the host or target machines go into power-save modes.

Re:s2disk hibernate + WoL or scheduled wake-up w/B

[mokus000]

Sorry for the followup, just wanted to clarify:

That's 5 to 10 minutes before Explorer or the start menu will respond to mouse events, not 5 to 10 minutes before the apps I need to use are open and ready to use.

After a torturously long OS boot, I get to wait for visual studio to start up, which takes nearly as long. Add on outlook, Groove, etc, and I'd say the original poster isn't too far off on 15-20 minutes before the computer is ready to do any real work.

Power

[ledow]

And any company THAT bothered by this would be using more power-efficient PC's anyway. Face it, 99% of staff using a computer as part of their daily work don't need a full desktop PC and certainly don't need dual-core systems with Gbs of RAM. So instead of faffing about trying to recoup some of the loss from buying that terrible hardware in the first place (monetary costs, environmental costs, maintenance costs, etc.) they would be much better off buying some low-power desktops (like the Atom's, Via's etc.) and thus not pumping most of their electricity into heat wastage, fans, office cooling, etc. when they could just have a small 60W or so (maximum) PC that does the same jobs.

Those who are committed to their existing hardware - well, they should have been specifying and testing WOL, ACPI sleep, etc. in the first place if they wanted to make sure it worked in their particular environment. Chances are those stuck on old machines will have more problems trying to get the PC to sleep and to wake on cue than they would have just to buy a new cheap desktop. My pet hate is machines that won't WOL without having first been turned on manually - a power cut overnight (when the machines aren't on) means that the PC's just sit there and ignore WOL packets. And that is on fairly recent hardware (2 years old?). I know it's "wake" on LAN, but a full boot and complete shutdown (not sleep mode) will let it respond to WOL packets forever until the power disappears again.

I would hazard a guess that the following ALL save more power than would be saved by shutting off PC's overnight for a lot less hassle and inconvenience:

- Cutting off background services in Windows.
- Replacing hardware with more modern equipment.
- Disabling, centralising and/or just changing vendor of the antivirus programs to use less CPU, disk-access, etc.
- Replacing 10% of computers with a low-power alternative (even a laptop!)
- Turning off WAP's and other unnecessary networking hardware overnight.
- Turning the room temperature up/down by half a degree permanently (depending on the outside environment)
- Installing doors that shut themselves to keep hot/cold air in.
- Opening a couple of blinds/curtains to let sunlight into some of the less-used but still heated areas (cold-countries only) or fitting blinds/curtains to reduce the heat taken in from outside (hot-countries only).
- Training users to use shortcut keys instead of clicking the mouse for everything.
- Or removing that poxy plasma TV in the company reception which is on permanent loop playing to nobody.

The thing is, we take power so much for granted that when we get told to "save" it, we worry over the little bits (energy-saving bulbs) and completely forget about the larger draws (heating / cooling). $36 / year / PC is nothing, no matter the scale of the company. Even a 100 PC office (which could theoretically save $3600 / year) will probably spend multiples of that on heating/cooling, bringing someone in to do the work, or make multiples of that amount by selling off some of their old IT kit, fitting those light fittings that only switch on if someone is actually in an office, etc.

Getting businesses to understand means providing a valid, comparable reason. That normally means *money*. But even the green-friendly companies will save much, much, much, much more money by just replacing el-cheapo PC World computer with a decent low-power one and then selling off the old kit. If you do it right, you would even MAKE money by doing this (I know it's about £200/unit for a decent mini-ITX machine, and you could easily get that for a recent second-hand machine of good spec).

It's a *waste* of time. The proportion of power you save does not justify the effort to do it, especially not when a tiny, unnoticeable adjustment to a thermostat saves ten times the amount of power, and the hassle associated with implementing power-friendly PC's does not justify the end. Put a sign up and send a memo round to staff to turn off their PC

The Math...

[kenh]

The article said:

All told, U.S. organizations will waste $2.8 billion to power 108 million unused machines this year.

and

By turning off unused machines and practicing proper PC power management, companies stand to save more than $36 per desktop PC per year.

When I multiply $36 in savings per PC times the 108 Million PCs being described, I get a possible savings of $3.88B, or about $1B more than the original article reported. We "waste" $2.8B, but we can "save" $3.88B by turning off unused PCs and practicing power management? Are the savings or the waste over-estimated? One has to be wrong...

Re:I didn't really get this at first.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're the exception. Hooray! Seriously, what's wrong with a receptionist turning off their computer that's used for email & a spreadsheet or two at night?

Install LinuxBIOS, too

[Antique Geekmeister]

One of the reasons the machines don't get turned off is the expensive 5 minutes wasted by boot times. It's an irritating waste of precious time as you return from lunch or start work in the morning, it discourages turning off boxes at night, and it discourages turning off boxes during the day when unused.

Unfortunately, this is partly the fault of Microsoft (who enourage stupid, resource gobbling behavior at boot time like frequent resource scanning by update software and unnecessary disk indexing), and BIOS's that use ancient, proprietary, and frankly broken tools to scan for hardware that hasn't been used in 10 years. The OLPC very successfully uses a LinuxBIOS and booting procedure that cuts this lengthy pause to seconds: it should be on every server and most desktops in the country, but motherboard makers are very reluctant to support it for various reasons. As near as I can tell, it's mostly due to fear of intellectual property issues involving ancient BIOS utilities, and unwillingness to publish their own hardware knowledge associated with their own particular component selection.

I'd love to see ASUS use LinuxBIOS by default. I've actually been asked to do that for deployments: it wasn't mature enough to use yet at that time, but it seems much more stable now and of higher quality than the average new motherboard BIOS.

Re:Compulsory miss

[paskie]

So set up a RTC wake-up to 15 minutes before you usually turn up at work? Go make a coffee in the meantime?

Productivity

[happy_place]

I've some coworkers whose PCs would be more productive turned off... I won't even go into their environmental impact... [shudder!] --Ray

Heat Cycle Bullshit...

[cyclocommuter]

I assembled an AMD Athlon / Athlon ASUS A7N8X and a Pentium 4 / MSI motherboard powered PCs at about the same time more than 5 years ago and these computers are being powered on and off almost everyday. They still work.

Newer PC components especially the motherboard usually still have juice in them even though you power them off. The CPUs and graphics card even when powered on will still experience heat cycles ranging from just above room temp when idle and depending on the efficacy of the cooling system, to 60 C (for CPUs) or 90 C (for high end graphics cards) when playing games.

Unused ? How dare you...

[TractorBarry]

How dare you call these PCs unused... They're part of my botnet you insensitive clods !

Re:Same here

[Pope]

That seems incredibly excessive. The entire system in Stanby mode after 5 minutes, what exactly is the point? I could see going to Standby after an hour or so, but full on Hibernate in 15 is just ridiculous. The energy savings would be minimal at best, and the annoynce at having to wait for the system to come back into a usable state would be far greater.