Earth Day may or may not appeal to your eco-conscience, but keeping the reins steady on your computer's carbon footprint and energy consumption makes good technological and financial sense. Reducing your energy output may prolong the life of your hardware--especially a laptop or Netbook--and can help save cash, which we all know is the "greenest" motivation around.
This collection of environmentally friendly software lassos together these apps, plus a few others to help understand and appreciate our planet's cities, flora, and outer space neighbors.
ENERGY-SAVERS
Edison for XP and Windows Vista is the newest one-stop app for monitoring how much energy and money you save when you tighten up your computer's sleep and shutdown schedules. A slider lets you decide after how many minutes you want to shut down your computer's display and hard drive during the peak work day. You can program differing criteria for off hours. Manual customization is also possible if you need to ease into greener computing.
How many extra pages do you really need when you print that page from a Web site? And how many sheets of paper do you generally recycle after replicating that page? We all agree that it's much better for the environment if you can avoid inking up those unwanted extras in the first place. The free GreenPrint World and pro-level GreenPrint Home Premium can help (watch the video.)
Vista users wishing to shrink their energy footprints a size smaller can get started with Vista Battery Saver, a freeware app that disables certain Vista features, particularly when your power reserves dip below a predefined threshold. This app is especially useful for owners of Vista laptops who are running on limited batteries.
A perpetually running computer is an energy-dumping computer. Luckily, even if you're too lazy to shut your computer down yourself, freeware like Auto Shutdown can schedule shutdowns for you. Not only that, this app gives you five modes for taking your rig offline, and lets you program hot-key combinations to launch the sleep or "off" mode of your choice without opening the program's interface.
If you've got Google Desktop, Google's energy-saving gadget will monitor your power savings from your Google Desktop dashboard. You'll have to make some concessions, of course, like letting your computer hibernate or shut down after shorter intervals of idleness, but seeing that you spared enough energy to power a JumboTron at a baseball game may cause you to rethink just how valuable 24/7 access to the computer is to you. Tags: Netbook, App, Dashboard, Laptop Computer, carbon footprint
