Benefits Of Eco IT

[mysteriouza]

We may be in the middle of a credit crunch, but alongside all the money-off ads for everything from food to cars, green is still a powerful marketing tool.
So the computer world, like everything else is now flooded with ads for energy efficient' models, all of which make even last year's upgraded feel a bit like a guilty environmental time bomb.
Eco-guilt, apparently, is still seen as the way to loosen any tightly held purse strings.

The greenest solution, which by the way, is also the cheapest, is to use your computer efficiently.
A recent controversial report claimed that 2 search engines could emit as much carbon dioxide as a kettle boiling enough water for a cup of tea, roughly 7g of CO2.
This was immediately refuted which puts the figure at a more palatable 0.2g a search.
But multiply that by 200 million searches a day, and it adds up.

Most of use though aren't going to stop using the internet any time soon, so other more practical ways to reduce IT footprint includes setting your power-saving options to 15 minutes or less, so that your monitor and hard drive will go into sleep mode, while the hard drive will turn off after not being used for 15 minutes.
Make a point of switching off your computer completely if you won't be using it for an hour or more, and allowing it plenty of space on your desk so that the cooling fan work more efficiently.

Rushing out to buy a new mercury, and arsenic free machine, meanwhile, may be tempting, but chucking away your perfectly adequate computer is hardly a solution.

The greenest step is to hang on to your existing machine for as long as you can, before buying a new version, and if you do catch upgrade fever, bear in mind that a laptop is by far the greenest option, using less than a quarter of energy of the average desktop computer.