Making Your Company Eco-Friendly by Utilizing Power Control Solutions

Ineffective PC power management is one of the key factors of power wasting in modern offices nowadays. Most of PCs are not 100% used all working day, but they consume electric energy through a day to keep working. About a half of all office computers are not powered off at night by users. Almost every company and organization loose from thousands to millions of dollars per year because of energy wasting. Computer software and hardware vendors realized this problem time ago and created technologies that should assist companies and organizations to reduce power energy wasting and, as the result, save money and reduce global CO2 emission.

How to begin saving energy costs? The easiset approach to start is to turn on power management settings of hardware and operation system. This approach is good not only for office computers, but also for home desktops. Hardware manufacturers often make computer power management settings available for configuration through BIOS setup. Options can be different depending on a hardware type and vendor. Most recent versions of operation systems include advanced power control options with various settings. For instance, in Windows it's possible to have multiple power management profiles and switch between them quickly. Every profile can be configured to specify power management options for a monitor, a processor and other PC components. Utilizing these settings computer can be configured to turn off a display and go to a sleep mode after defined inactivity time.

Using power control plan for switching PC to a sleep mode in order to saving energy, is pretty effective for a single computer. In particular, it's the sole action required for home users to benefit from power saving. But this approach isn't very effective on practice in company environment. The main reason is that it's difficult to apply required power management profiles to all computers. Manual work is required to go to all desktops and enable power settings or it requires creating scripts or urilizing specialized software to apply power settings over a network. In any case, it requires time and cost investment, at the end. As it was stated earlier, it's wrong to expect 100% return of investment in this case. On practice many users will try to revert applied changes because, for instance, they don't like that their PC is going to sleep in 10 minutes when they are on a call, or they don't like that computer starts slowly. Based on industry reports a success rate of using a power management plan is only about 60% after two months since its applying.

There's another, less restrictive and more powerful way to organize power management for businesses and organizations. According to research, a significant part of energy is wasted at night, when users keep their PCs working with no active assignments. Almost a half of users just forget to turn off computer or keep it running to reduce startup time next morning. Network administrators can detect these computers and power them off and on remotely. This job can be entirely automated using a remote shutdown and wake up software.

Wake-on-LAN technology (also abbreviated as WOL) was implemented by software and hardware vendors in order to allow waking up computers remotely. This technology makes possible to power up desktops, that are in a sleep mode, by sending them a specific packet over a network. It enables network administrators to wake up selected computers in a network, when required, using a software that can send Wake-on-LAN packets. Also system administrators have an access to all company PCs over a network and it can be used to control computers remotely. Power management tools usually contain remote shutdown features used by administrators to turn off computers over a network. Advanced power management software include remote shutdown, Wake-on-LAN and other operations to allow administrators managing state of network computers remotely from a central place. This software can also include scheduling options to run wake up and shut down operations automatically at a defined date and time.

Power management software is very effective for managing large networks and can be used by enterprises, universities and school districts with thousands of workstations in a network. Network administrators can use it to make own power management plans and turn off and on PCs according to schedule. It guarantees that all PCs will be turned off and on when required. In a global prospective it allows businesses and organization to cut power bills and become greener.

Learn more about fundamentals of computer power management in the article about automatic shutdown of network computers.