After reading this post on Treehugger about these ads, I decided I needed to apply this to my own computing habits. I have a PC in the house which does nothing but backup my other machines. Though this backup job runs at 11 PM every night, I used to keep the PC running 24 hours a day.
Obviously, this is wasteful, so I poked around in the PC’s bios and found a watchdog option which will boot the computer by a clock setting. Now the PC boots right before 11 PM, does its backup chores, and shuts itself down after half an hour. Numerous trees saved, untold pounds of carbon dioxide saved from the atmosphere, and a quieter house, too!
wow, I’ve been doing the same thing around my house. Freaky.
I recycled all of my old servers and I’m moving my file sharing to a mac mini with an external USB drive — totals about half the wattage of 1 tower.
doesn’t linux support sleep/wake mode? so you wouldn’t have to do that in BIOS, right?
Yes, sleep/wake is available. But it uses much more energy than simply letting BIOS turn it on. I have a very specific use for this PC at this time (backups) so I can tell it precisely when it should be on and off. Also, even in sleep/wake mode the power supply fan is making noise. This way there is no noise until it turns on.
Now all I gotta do is remove the speaker jumper from the motherboard so I don’t hear the POST beep when I’m trying to fall asleep. 🙂
Eventually I’ll stop being lazy and buy a USB flash drive bigger than the 128MB ones I have. Then I can run a bigger form of Linux on my NSLU2 device, add a USB drive and have it take over the backup duties. A $50 file server which is small, quiet, and powerful.