06.22.07
Cool Computers and Green Printers
Being nearly a conjoined twin to my computer, I’ve written previously about the energy consumption of computers. While it saves 67% of the yearly energy use to reduce computer use to 8 hours a day, there’s been more than one time that I thought I’d turned off my computer only to find that it was on all night asking if I wanted to save a document before it would shut down. Well, now Local Cooling has a cure for that. Local Cooling is a free application from Uniblue Labs that claims to reduce your computer’s power consumption. Actually, according to Treehugger, it just monitors your energy use by looking at the power options in the control panel, but it is fun to see how much you’ve saved by having your monitor switch off in 5 minutes instead of 10.
Another program that has more use than Local Cooling is GreenPrint. I also found out about this from Treehugger. This one isn’t free but does have a 30-day trial download version and may be worth it in the amount of paper and ink that you save (their site says that average user saves $90 per year, at $0.06 per sheet). It shows you the document before you print and allows you to remove any pages that you don’t need to print (the last 3 lines of a stupid signature file in emails, for instance). It also creates PDFs so that you don’t need to print to paper at all. This is a nice, cheap way to get the PDF writing benefits of the relatively expensive Adobe Acrobat, with their price of $35 stacking up nicely to the hundreds of dollars that Adobe costs. It’s Windows only, but OSX users have always been able to print right to PDF.