Save money by adjusting your PC's power settings

In a time when energy prices are increasing almost daily, we’re all looking for ways to cut down on power usage and save money. This can be hard, especially when so many pieces of modern technology require power.

And it’s not just fridges and washing machines that guzzle electricity and drive up energy costs: your computer and its peripherals often account for a good chunk of the electricity bill, too. Here, we’ll explain how to lower the energy costs of your computer without limiting its uses.

Precious power
According to the charity the Energy Saving Trust, by 2020 computing and entertainment technology will account for 45 per cent of electricity used in UK households.

Desktop computers usually comprise two main units, each of which consumes electrical power. These are the system unit, which houses the processor, memory and disk drives, and the second is the monitor.

Many people leave their PC on when it’s not in use. This is understandable: after all, Windows can take some time to start up, which is annoying. What’s more, most monitors will switch off after a (long) period of time, giving the impression that power is not being used. This is, sadly, not the case. Even though the monitor might be saving some power, the computer itself is still running at full power and using up electricity.

What many people don’t know is that there are a range of features and different power modes that allow you to keep the PC running and ready to start up in a matter of seconds, without using up so much energy. These enable you to control the power-management features of your display, hard disk and shut down options. We’ll explain how to use them in Windows XP. Vista includes the same options and more besides. ­ For more information see 'Power options in Vista' below.

Modern computers can use a Sleep mode, known in XP as Standby. This cuts power and shuts down unnecessary operations such as the monitor, hard disks and peripheral devices. Sleep mode continues to supply power to the computer’s memory, though, so information about how Windows is running is stored there, ready to reappear almost instantly.

If you want to save even more power, there’s also a second mode called Hibernate. This saves all the information from the computer’s memory to the hard disk then shuts down the PC. When you restart it all the memory is quickly reloaded, so you can continue from where you left off.
Entering and exiting Hibernate mode takes a bit longer than Standby, since it needs to write to and read from your hard disk. However, Hibernate uses less power than Standby and far less than when the PC is running, so it’s a great way to save money.

Most Windows XP computers are not configured to use Hibernate mode, so in order to use it you’ll need to enable it. To do this click Start, then Control Panel and double-click Power Options, which will bring up a range of power-saving options. Click the Hibernate tab and tick the Enable Hibernate check box then click Apply. If the Hibernate tab is unavailable, your computer does not support this feature. With this done, click the Shut Down button on the Start menu ­ Hibernate should now appear as an option alongside Shut Down and Restart. To restart the computer once it has hibernated, press the power button.