October 16, 2006 9:00 PM PDT
Vista flexes its power
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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.
"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."
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"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.
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.
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.
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.
before Vista
years, probably more like 15. Sounds like another amazing
Microsoft innovation.
Add that capability, and I'll let the machine catch all the ZZZZ's it wants.
has to be true.
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?
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.
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.
Savo
Worcestershire England
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.
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.
MS 10-15 years to copy this from the Mac OS? news worthy??? cnet
news needs a new editor.
- Big Deal - Micorosft Technologies Never Work Properly
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by bw94382
October 17, 2006 12:28 PM PDT
- 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.
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