Does your computer illuminate an emtpy room?
If you answered yes, did you know that you’ve been helping me contribute to a loss of over 30 billion kilowatt-hours of power each year?
A barrel of oil contains 42 gallons and produces an average 556 kilowatt hours of electrical power. Now consider your computer. A good spec PC can use up to 200 watts per hour. If you have a CRT monitor, it adds a further 80 watts (TFT screens use less). So your system is consuming over 1 KWh of power for every four hours of normal use. If you leave your computer on 24/7, that’s the equivalent of a whole barrel of oil every 90 days! If you optimize your computer with LocalCooling and power down when you’re not using it you could extend this to over six months!
So, what can you do about it? The reasonable thing to do is to cut the dang thing off when we’re not using it, eh? Too bad most of us consistently forget to do that. Enter LocalCooling. It’s a little program by Uniblue that runs in the background that will shut your computer down according to the settings you input.
I’ve had it running on my computer for a couple of weeks now and have had no problem besides the annoying beeping it does as a warning before it shuts the computer down. The beeping can be fixed by overwriting the wav file (C:\Program Files\LocalCooling\data - or wherever you install it) with a silent wav.
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