Edison: Free energy-saving PC software
Although power management software has been around for years, there's clearly room for improvement, particularly with rising energy prices and environmental awareness.
Start-up Verdiem on Wednesday released software called Edison that makes it easy for people to schedule when a PC goes into a low power consumption mode at home or at work.
The Edison software lets people set dials for putting a PC into energy-saving mode.
(Credit: Verdiem)Verdiem's CEO, Kevin Klustner, is scheduled to highlight Edison and PC energy consumption during a conference call with Microsoft's chief environmental strategist, Robert Benard, and Intel's Lorie Wigle, president of the Climate Savers computing industry consortium.
PCs can consume as much as 10 percent of a home's energy bill and give off as much carbon dioxide as a family car. Even when a PC's screen saver kicks on, the machine can still consume between 100 watts and 250 watts.
The Edison software doesn't completely shut a computer off but rather moves it to a "suspend" state, which uses less energy. Users can also schedule to shut down the screen and hard drive before going into suspend mode.
The tool lets users have work and home settings. It has a read-out of how much electricity you are saving, also translated into reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and dollar savings.
Estimates will vary widely, depending on electricity rates and type of computer, but Verdiem says the average savings is 410 kilowatt hours a year, or $36.50.
Verdiem, which is bankrolled in part by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, was founded by people who were looking for better power management software than what's built into Windows.
But developing the free Edison software isn't entirely altruistic. The sign-up process promotes Verdiem's power management software for businesses, called Surveyor, which the company says can pay for itself within a few years.
The license for Edison is for one person. It runs on Windows XP or Windows Vista.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
Of couse, this could be done using other means (Group Policy for instance), but it looks a lot better to Edison in providing a time-limited rebate when a company can give them a report of, "this is how much energy we'd be using when not implementing power saving settings, and this is how much we're not using with those settings in place."
I particularly like the Estimated Savings UI section that they provide, that without, you'd otherwise be in the dark.
And to joetasta70's comment; I surely aggree. But, I also recognize that there are many things M$ could have implemented into Windows, but instead, they focus so much on preventing piracy. LOL M$, how about preventing our environment from going to crap; but hey, "Bill's dream has pretty much come true, just about every household has a computer these days" if not two or more.
- by dactnl July 12, 2009 12:58 PM PDT
- Seems a great app to me though a bit of time management and switching off your system when not using for a longer time is still an option. Red an article about it on saving-energy.eu.
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