Windows 7: Why Microsoft’s energy-saving claims don’t add up | Fred Pearce

Microsoft's low-light mode doesn't earn it the right to claim its new operating system is eco-friendly You will have spotted the ballyhoo by now - Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system is out today . And, rather as when Microsoft launched Vista three years ago, the company is trumpeting its energy-saving credentials. Windows 7 offers "more than just lip service" on eco-friendly features . Microsoft is not making any specific claims about how much power Windows 7 can save, though in a demo for journalists in California recently, a laptop playing a DVD achieved 20% more battery life with Windows 7 than with Vista. Microsoft's coyness is fair enough. The energy gains depend too much on the interface between hardware and software . Instead, it claims to offer green-minded consumers more options. When running Windows 7, individual users can more easily decide how bright they want their screens , for instance. And corporate IT departments will be able to run power-efficiency diagnostics (pdf) to optimise the operation of PCs within their networks. That is all to the good. Choice is important. But you have to wonder how many IT departments will take the trouble to explore the energy-saving possibilities of the new Windows when, according to Francois Ajenstat , director for environmental sustainability at Microsoft, "probably 70% of business users leave PCs on at night." First things first, you might say. Arguably Microsoft should be giving its users rather fewer choices and rather more shoves in the direction of using their machines more efficiently. Take the screen. The biggest energy user for most PCs and laptops, it typically consumes 40-50% of the power. As one of Microsoft's engineering blogs puts it : "The easiest way to save power on a desktop PC is to reduce the display idle timeout to something very aggressive, such as two or five minutes". So the best way for Microsoft to use its software to improve power efficiency would be to set an "aggressive" timeout as the default setting.

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Windows 7: Why Microsoft's energy-saving claims don't add up | Fred Pearce

Google and Hewlett-Packard create widgets for green living

Google and Hewlett-Packard are providing widgets to help computer users monitor energy consumption With a heightened awareness of the environment and an increased urgency to address climate change, people are looking to all areas of their lives to reduce their carbon footprint. Computers and the internet have come under fire from green groups for their contributions to carbon emissions. Environmental groups have even criticised Google for the carbon cost of every internet search made via the search engine. But to put this in context, estimates from the London-based Climate Group found in its Smart 2020 report that computers account for about 2% of total global emissions. By 2020, with more people owning computers, mobile phones and other gadgets, that percentage will rise to about 6%, according to the same report. The good news is that in the past decade, computers have not only become smaller, faster and cheaper, but also much more energy-efficient. The cost of electricity and the demand for longer battery life for laptops and portable devices have been driving companies to increase the energy efficiency of electronics. You can do a lot these days to build not only a very fast but also very efficient computer. You can choose energy efficient chips, energy efficient hard drives and power supplies with the 80 Plus efficiency rating . Google and Hewlett-Packard are now getting involved by providing widgets to help you monitor the energy consumption of your computer and change your habits to cut your computing carbon footprint. Google employees have created a software "gadget" that will enable and optimise your computer's energy management settings. (You'll need to have Google Desktop installed to use it.) Hewlett-Packard has launched its Power to Change scheme with a downloadable Adobe Air widget that reminds you to turn off your computer if you aren't using it. The site says that more than 23,000 people have joined the campaign. These may be small steps, but the energy monitors help you understand your contributions to cut your carbon footprint. Energy Computing Hewlett-Packard Google Carbon footprints Energy efficiency Kevin Anderson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Google and Hewlett-Packard create widgets for green living

Supercomputer in the firing line over carbon footprint

It's impossible to ignore the irony that the Met Office supercomputer dedicated to modelling climate change has an enormous carbon footprint. But critics just miss the point In the past I've written about the internet's energy footprint , and raised the question of whether we should consider ways to drastically reduce the power consumed by data centres as our lives go increasingly online. So it was with more than a little interest that I read this story about the Met Office's weather-predicting supercomputer - and how, ironically, it has a pretty big carbon footprint. According to a study by the Department of Communities looking into the footprints of public buildings around the UK, the £33m IBM cluster produces up to 75% of the carbon emissions from the Met Office's HQ in Exeter. That means it's responsible for a good deal of their annual output of 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide - one of the highest totals in the country. It's an easy headline, of course - and probably feels particularly sweet for those who revel in poking at climate change scientists (and they are certainly a vocal group). But the delight in this irony is also driven, in part, by the misplaced assumption that a climate scientist would think that all carbon emissions are bad. Are all CO2 emissions equal? Well I'm certainly happier to see carbon being spent solving the world's biggest problems than ferrying people around the globe for business meetings they could do through teleconferencing. And, of course, it's all relative in any case. Supercomputers in the past used vast amounts of energy to run, and were extremely primitive by comparison to today's beasts - on a visit to the Museum of Computer History earlier this year , I saw an old IBM machine that used the same amount of power as a small town but had just a few KB of memory. The Met Office machine hopes to be able to run at a Petaflop soon - that's 1 thousand trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations every second. The truth is that while the public rarely thinks about supercomputers - except, perhaps, when there's a chess game at stake - these machines do amazing work that is impossible to replicate elsewhere. These are the machines that fold proteins, that crunch data from particle accelerators; they are the sort of machines that could help cure cancer - or, in the case of the Met's cluster, save thousands of lives by accurately modelling a climate-related disaster. It's worth thinking about. Computing Carbon emissions Carbon footprints Bobbie Johnson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Supercomputer in the firing line over carbon footprint