ReNe: it's tough to be a green cyborg

Although the internet seems as airy as a butterfly when it comes to environmental footprints, there's actually a lot of hidden cost behind computers.

First, there is the environment cost in the manufacture of a PC, which apparently requires ten times the weight of the product in chemical and fossil fuels, and uses heavy toxic metals such as lead, arsenic, antimony, cadmium, chromium, and so on.

Next, if we look at the running costs (electricity costs) alone, it's can be quite staggering.

According to surveys conducted by the market research firm IDC, between 2000 and 2005, the power consumption of network computers doubled worldwide.
--snip--
Depending on the initial data, one Google search consumes enough electricity to run an 11-watt, energy-saving lightbulb for 15 minutes to an hour. [news article]

However, on the flip side, there are also a lot of environmental savings that could be had with computers. For example, online newspapers, magazines, articles, movies, music -- moving these from physical objects to digital data is environmentally friendly. I haven't subscribed to newspapers in almost ten years, and now that I read more news than before and from all over, if I had to buy each paper I read, I'd be very much poorer. I haven't bought a CD in years, and in the past year, I've only bought one book; many books can now be found online. No more bulky photo albums and envelopes of negatives that would degrade in years. Although I don't watch TV, I'm sure you can watch TV with your computer, thus saving one more appliance. At work, one can theoretically save a lot of paper by keeping all the bookkeeping digital, using powerpoint instead of transparencies, using emails instead of paper notices, etc.

I would like to be more environmentally friendly but I'm not going to turn all pastoral. Like I've said before, I'm a cyborg and I need my computer and internet. Ah, hard choices. I'd continue to use my computer but I'd pay more attention to reducing electricity wastage.

Some ways to reduce the power draw of the PCs if you have leave them on all the time (though not all apply to laptops):

• Configure the hard drives to sleep on inactivity.
• Do the same for the monitor. In fact, don't use an active screensaver, aka CPU-eaters. Have it blank out.
  
• In fact, switch your monitor to a LCD. A LCD typically draws less than half the power of a CRT.
• Configure your system preferences to run on energy-saving modes.
  
• Disconnect peripherals that are not in use, e.g. portable hard drives, CD-ROMS.
• Shut down when not in use. This is very hard for me; my computer's up-time tend to be measured in weeks, though it does go to sleep.
  
• Don't use a high-end video card. Unless you really must. After the CPU, the video card is by far the biggest power consumer in a typical PC.
• Upgrade to a more efficient power supply. (I didn't know this until I was googling around for tips.) Apparently, a certain percentage of the input power to your PC is lost as waste during the conversion from wall power to something the PC can use. At typical power loads (~90w), the average power supply efficiency is a disappointing 65%. So check your power supply efficiency.