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Make the move from technophile to ecophile

By Susanne Hasulo

When you consider that computers now consume about 10 percent of the electricity generated in North America and that a great many PCs still end up in landfills, leaching deadly chemicals, it makes sense to adopt more eco-friendly computing options.

John Hiddema, technical consultant for Nerds on Site, is one of the many people making a conscious effort to go green. He recycles, buys organic produce, uses cleaning products less harmful to the environment, owns energy-efficient appliances, and has configured his
PC to use less energy. He’s also going green on the job. Some of the work he does for clients’ computer systems can be done remotely from his home office, drastically reducing his need for a car.

Here are some tips for making your technology use more eco-friendly.

Link/Source: http://snurl.com/s88j7

Just buy a modern PC. Modern computers feature power saving technology built right into them.

Intel and AMD feature technology that lowers their clock speeds (Speedstep for Intel, Cool N Quiet for AMD) when idle - which is 99% of the time unless you are gaming, video encoding, etc. Originally started in laptop processors for battery life it went to desktops to lower their power draw.

Even Intel's high end line, their Core i7 series, will shut down 3 of the 4 cores when idle to significantly reduce power draw.

AMD's latest gaming video card, the Radeon HD 5800 series, are seriously powerful but at idle (not gaming) drop down to fractions of their rated clock speed to reduce temperature and power draw to a mere 20W.