Recent research from Computacenter and Fujitsu Siemens finds that the 200 largest UK companies waste £61m a year on unneeded electricity by using power-hungry, inefficient PCs. This wasted electricity equates to over 2.8 million kWh of energy.

Of course the recommendations from Computacenter and Fujitsu Siemens are that these businesses should throw out their desktops and replace them with “Green-PCs” made and supplied by, say, Computacenter or Fujitsu Siemens. Though, I’m not so sure that throwing out thousands of perfectly good desktop computers is that great for the environment either!

In fact the report also finds that “more than a third (37%) of workers don’t switch off PCs when they leave the office” and “by adopting green IT equipment and switching off desktops when not in use the top 200 companies will make annual savings of around £305,000 each”. One of the largest UK corporations could save up to £2m by adopting such policies.

So for those in a rush to get out the door at 5pm, or who forget to switch off their machine, why not create a simple Macro Scheduler macro which shuts down the PC automatically at, say, 6pm:

ShutDownWindows>0

Just in case you might be working late you could add a 30 second warning allowing you to cancel:

Let>ASK_TIMEOUT=30000
Let>Prompt=Shutting Down in 30 Seconds. No to Abort, Yes to Shutdown now.
Ask>Prompt,cont
If>cont=YES
  ShutDownWindows>0
Endif

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 8:31 am and is filed under Automation, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.