Eugene's observations

I was shocked recently to read just how much running my PC is costing me in electricity bills. It was calculated that for a regular PC comprising a 3.5GHz CPU, 120GB disk, 1GB RAM with common peripherals and programs between £80 and £100 a year was used by running the PC for 8 hours a day.

Windows Vista running on modern hardware, especially when sleeping, is much more efficient than XP on older components, but that still adds up to more than I had expected. So I shall continue to leave the screen saver disabled on new PCs I supply, and continue to set the power adjustments so that the monitor is powered down after a few minutes of inactivity.

Sleeping (where the machine is on reduced power holding the current state of the PC in volatile memory) and hibernating (where the machine is on reduced power having saved the current state of the PC to the disk) remain good to enable automatically after, say, 1 and 2 hours of idleness.

Powering the PC off (shutting down) is the best way to a greener planet.