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California To Adopt First US Energy-Saving Rules For Computers (reuters.com)
California regulators were poised on Wednesday to adopt the nation's first mandatory energy efficiency rules for computers and monitors -- devices that account for 3 percent of home electric bills and 7 percent of commercial power costs in the state. From a report on Reuters: The state Energy Commission said that when fully implemented, the plan will save consumers $373 million a year and conserve as much electricity annually as it takes to power all San Francisco's homes. Final approval of the standards, expected at a meeting in Sacramento of the five-member commission, caps a nearly two-year planning process that had input from environmentalists, industry, scientists and consumer groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental group that helped devise the standards, has said the new standards would cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion in power generation by 700,000 tons a year. The California standards set a benchmark for a machine's overall energy use and leave manufacturers the flexibility to choose which efficiency measures to use to meet it -- an approach that the NRDC says fosters innovation.
I don't know how much money that would actually save. I put a watt-miser on our 5-8 year old monitors at work and they don't even register, which means they're under 500ma.
All devices I've purchased have energy start compliance and saving features. Due to the annoyance of some features I have to disable them.
Like power saving brightness settings that adapt to the room lighting. Because I have to keep fucking with the brightness from what the TV perceives as light level in the room. E.G Window shining light into the room but not directly on the TV so it dims but overall room brightness is much higher.
Plus the time it took to get the right color and brightness / contrast I wanted. My computer is also high performance, and I used to notice significantly if a primary HDD powered down. It was a real pain. I have an SSD now and my storage drive I let spin down, but if they are nit picky on it, some content and programs cache significantly, which would let the HDD power down and it would drive me nuts getting lag spikes each time it spins up.
So I obviously adjust the power down time. I also notice the lag when the processor clocks down when it thinks it can, but it was wrong and clocks back up. I don't like stutter. If I'm playing a game it's a death. So I don't let my CPU clock down most of the time. Occasionally I adjust the power settings when I know I won't be doing anything intensive for days, and do shut my PC down when not in use.
But what else? Auto suspend? I mean that shit is annoying. It's been 20+ years and we still can't go to standby and back safely all the time depending on what programs are in use.
I will shit bricks if they expect me to pay the same amount for stuttering shitty low power / power saving hardware. They can fuck off I won't buy it.