Vista flexes its power

Companies have long known the benefits of making sure their workers get a good night's sleep--and they would be wise to let their PCs do the same, Microsoft says.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft plans to put machines to sleep after an hour of inactivity. While businesses and consumers can change that setting, the software maker said that they would be smart to let their computers nod off.

Microsoft estimates that allowing a PC to go to sleep during off hours, as compared with leaving it on all the time, saves anywhere from $55 a year to $70 annually, depending on the type of monitor.

"This is energy (consumed) when you are not even using the PC," said Dean DeWhitt, a director in the Windows kernel team at Microsoft. "It truly is a waste."

The company has done work in the upcoming Vista update to make sure that the PC can rest more easily. With Windows XP, programs could veto a user's request for the PC to go to sleep. In some cases, that meant that laptop owners thought they had put a PC to sleep, only to discover a few hours later that the machine had remained on and their notebook's battery had been drained.

But Microsoft is hoping to make an even bigger impact with desktops. Today, many businesses leave their computers on at night. Some do it to make sure that they can install security patches.

By adding the new sleep option, businesses can wake machines to install security updates, while letting them remain in the power-saving mode the rest of the time.

Also in Vista, businesses will be able to enforce the power management settings through the group policy tool. That means companies will be able to require, say, that a screen goes blank after 15 minutes of inactivity. Although Windows XP did not have that capability built in, some third-party companies, such as Verdiem, have offered that feature as an add-on.

All that snoozing time could pay off environmentally as well. Microsoft said that by putting six PCs to sleep, rather than leaving them on, businesses can save the same amount of carbon emissions that would otherwise require an acre of trees to absorb. That calculation depends on what means are used to generate the power for the PCs, with the actual energy emissions varying greatly by region.

Only about 10 percent of computers today have power management features enabled, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the Energy Star program designed to highlight products that can save on energy costs.

"We had a lot of success with monitors," said Steven Ryan, who oversees the EPA's power management initiative for computers and monitors. "Now we are trying to get more into PCs."

Tweaks still needed?
While Vista makes some notable steps forward, Bruce Twito, Veridiem's chief technical officer, said that there is plenty that has yet to be fixed in the operating system. Although Microsoft is allowing companies to set policies, Twito said that the group policy options are not flexible enough.

Twito also questions whether businesses will actually be able to remotely wake machines that are set to Vista's sleep mode.

"With the attention being paid to energy waste, organizations will want to do something."

--Bruce Twito, CTO, Veridiem

"The devil is in the details there," Twito said.

Microsoft says, meanwhile, that it has made significant improvements in Vista to support waking a machine over the network.

Veridiem plans to introduce its own Vista-compatible power management software within two months of the general availability of the new operating system. Vista is slated for release to large businesses in November and to the general public in January.

Twito said it is good news to see attention brought to the power wasted by leaving PCs running 24 hours a day.

"With the attention being paid to energy waste, organizations will want to do something," he said.

Today, he said, much of the attention goes to the wrong places. Screen savers, for example, use even more power than just letting a machine idle, since the CPU and even the graphics chip are often needed.

Ever increasing computing needs have meant that over the past 10 years, computers have been gobbling up more and more power, though recent chip advances have the potential to change this somewhat.

Vista is trying to make better use of power while the PC is on, too. In particular, the operating system now supports the same kind of power-throttling features on desktops that have been standard on laptops.

However, the fancy new Aero graphics in Vista are also fairly power-hungry. Testers of the operating system have reported significantly lower battery life while Vista than with XP running on the same machine. Microsoft has said it hopes to have nearly the same battery life with XP by the time Vista launches.

Microsoft had previously said it expected to be able to offer a significant savings in power use with Vista.

"We've done some calculations of power savings that we expect," Windows chief Jim Allchin said in an interview last year. "When 100 million machines are running Vista, the power savings around the world (will be) unbelievable."

The EPA's Ryan said that companies can see a big savings by using power management features, pointing to General Electric which saves $2.5 million a year by using sleep mode on its PCs and monitors. However, Ryan said it is critical that the technology be good enough that computers don't have problems, such as freezing up when a user tries to wake the machine.

"It looks very encouraging," Ryan said, but added, "The product hasn't been released yet."

[iBuzz]

Vista PCs will use MORE power!

You've got to be kidding me! With the higher system requirements needed to run Vista, these more powerful PCs will use more power, not less.

[Splashes]

This story reads like a parody . . .

. . . right out of "Dave Barry in Cyberspace."

"Buy the wonderful new version, because it does what the old
version should have done but didn't, and finally fixes the inane,
utterly indefensible problems in the old version that for some
reason we just never got around to fixing in the past five years.
We promise there won't be nearly as many problems in the new
version. We think. Sign here."

What a racket.

[verucabong]

You mean current computers can't sleep all on their own?

Looks to me that XP has an option to sleep the system after as little as 1 minute and as long as 5 hours. Mac OS X (and OS 9 if you want to include that) also has similar options. It sounds to me that companies (if they want to save power) need to change the default setting in XP (no sleep) or OS X (sleep after 1 hour) and roll that out. Do they really need to purchase Vista to see a power savings? I think not.

It's just another way for Microsoft to say "hey look what this can do" without telling you that your current computer does that already.

[fred dunn]

"On State" Power Requirements Higher.....

This is just a spin on what the real story is all about and that is that Vista is the most resource hungry desktop operating system (if you can really call it that) ever coded.
So by the time you figure the average consumption of your multiple core, multiple gigahertz CPU, your minimum 7200 RPM (yes that is a Vista spec) hard drives, your 2GB of fast system memory, your PCI Express video card with a DirectX 10 GPU and 256 MB of Video Ram then compare that with it's sleep mode you will not come out ahead of a decent power mode on windows XP.

Vista is a joke. Microsoft totally wasted millions on this bloatware resource hog. It offers a very small incremental increase in usability in trade for expensive hardware and rewriting a lot of programs not to mention redesigning your desktop PKI.

Do yourself and your company a favor...SKIP VISTA.

[andyking-pit]

No need to wait for Vista - you can do this Already!

http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_pm_ez_gpo

Energystar provides a free utility to enable power management via group policy and provides free support. Now THAT is somthing you should write an article about.

[drmdwhitley]

Vista flexes its power

Huh? Mac OS X has had this for years. I suppose Vista Reviewers will be gaga over that, but really...innovation is a Microsoft PR, not a Microsoft reality when it comes to Vista.

[richsevent4]

Yawn...

Just something else easily done by Mac OS X client/server way
before Vista

[Will Freeman]

Mac feature for 10 - 15 years!!

My Macs have had this same NEW ADVANCED feature for at least 10
years, probably more like 15. Sounds like another amazing
Microsoft innovation.

[ahazelwood]

Need Remote Desktop or Network Services

Unfortunately, they still haven't enabled the ability to wake the machine when I need to remote desktop into it, or need to serve web traffic off of it.

Add that capability, and I'll let the machine catch all the ZZZZ's it wants.

[Peter Bonte]

There is no sleep mode in XP?

Hard to believe XP has no sleep mode but if MS is saying so it
has to be true.

[garyfields]

read the whole story

b4 everone takes sides and starts a war, read the whole story. before we react and make inflammatory remakes we should think. the power savings feature is related to group policy, for instance at my old job they had the sleep mode on,but i bypassed it. with these new claimed settings the network admin can't be bypassed (easily).

[Jim Hubbard]

How to put XP monitors to sleep - BY MICROSOFT!

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/tips/monitorsleep.mspx

And, let's not forget that XP knows how to hibernate - essentially putting the PC to sleep too - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/mobility/getstarted/hibernate.mspx.

I mean really, CNET! Why don't you get someone to write articles that can at least Google about the subject before wasting our time?

[cacarson]

Sell It Baby!!!!!!

I can tell the sales team is working overtime on this one. By putting your system into suspend mode when the system's not in use you can save energy? Really? Duh!!!

And doesn't wake on LAN work with XP? It has for me. I always figured that was more a factor of the BIOS than the OS. Glad the Microsoft has set me straight (humor).

Sounds like the #1 way to save energy is to use an LCD monitor (another duh). That way you get the savings 24-7.

If Microsoft wanted to really save some trees they'd completely overhaul their OS so it didn't take a supercomputer (and thus an average system load of 200-400 watts) to run responsively.

CNet is doing their readers a disservice by publicizing this Microsoft fodder.

[Aryugaetu]

Mac Energy Saver "How To"

For those Mac users wanting to know more on how to use the
Energy Saver Preference to easily schedule their computer to
automatically Start-Up, Shut-Down, or Sleep (display/CPU/both),
you can find it in the Finder's Help menu or here...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/
mh1614.html

Don't forget, you can always open System Preferences and type
in "sleep" in the search field, and your Mac will highlight where
to click (Energy Saver).

You will also find many options available such as "Wake for
Ethernet network administrator access".

It is nice to see MS Windows users finally getting the features
they deserve. If you want to see Vista 3.0 for 2014, stop by any
Apple store today.

[cgamboak]

even my cell phone can do that

and my old tv, my heater system , mu fridge mhhh even me.

[sispersonal]

Vista flexes its power

It should be more of a concern for us all. We love are electrical appliances, but do we stop and think, "Should I buy this product, am I wasting energy". Do us hell. We purchase more and more. It?s as bad as societies need for fashion. Luckily for me, in my area of England are trash is divided in to recyclable bags, but we still don?t worry about the energy we consume. More and more households are investing in electric readers that are easily attached to the electric meter and they tell you how much electricity you are using and how much it?s costing you. It?s about time these devises were built in to are electric meters.
Savo
Worcestershire England

[ajbright]

uhuh..

try turning your stuff off, funny how that saves money with any operating system installed on any make or model of computer.

Actually the thing that people forget, particularly in these days of power saving peripherals, is that if 300+ staff turn off their monitors there can be a dramatic effect on the electricity bill - so that if you work somewhere where turning off computers is not an option, just turning off the monitors can make a real difference.

As for the OS power saving thing - I believe you'll find that just about every piece of modern hardware, from HDs to laptops, printers to monitors, can do this with no intervention of over-priced and what will probably be an over-hyped operating system.

[i,Jimbot]

Wow! What Technical Advances!!!

I am amazed at 2 things here. First, MS thinks that this bold new
technology that allows your computer to sleep is either bold or
new. Second, that C|Net would write such a large story about a
non-news item.

[ed9]

breaking news!! wow! groundbreaking!

microsoft is at the cutting edge!! what a concept! why did it take
MS 10-15 years to copy this from the Mac OS? news worthy??? cnet
news needs a new editor.

[bw94382]

Big Deal - Micorosft Technologies Never Work Properly

Microsoft operating systems have had some sort of 'energy saving' feature for at least ten years, and they have never worked effectively. This smacks of desperation on Microsoft's part -- they're trying to build a value proposition to drive corporate customers to upgrade when they know Vista offers no real benefit over Windows 2000/XP.