Save electricity by powering your computer off when not being used for long periods or by using the Windows Power Options to save electricity.
A trip to Power Options in the Control Panel can shave your electrical usage down. Set your monitor and hard drives to power down when you will not be using the PC for a while. It takes seconds for them to power up again.
Set the computer itself to go to sleep or to
hibernate after a certain period of inactivity.
Sleep mode is a low-power mode, and as with the
hard disks and monitor, it has everything up and
running in just a few moments when you want to
start working again.
Turn It Off!
Printers, scanners, speakers, monitors ... surrounding your computer is a multitude of peripherals that suck power even when the PC is switched off. It may not seem like much, but even an idle printer is a drain on the utility bill. A good rule is to turn off anything you will not be using for a while. That includes turning off your monitor (rather than letting it sit in low power mode when the computer is off), and turning on your printer only when you actually have something to print.
Some
devices have hard-to-reach power buttons - or
worse, no power buttons at all. Power strips
such as the
Smart Strip can help; the Smart Strip, for
example, switches off devices plugged into
specific outlets when the computer is switched
off.
Also, don't forget to unplug your phone, camera, or any other rechargeable device as soon as it's finished juicing up - even though the batteries stop drawing power when they're full, electricity is still flowing through the cable.
