What Makes a Computer Consume More Power?

Most high-end systems boast energy-saving features, but even with those measures in place, you might be startled by how much such a computer consumes when it’s most active. While you can’t make a practical reduction in a computer’s power consumption when you use it intensely, you can still lower the amount of power it consumes when you’re using it casually, or when you’re off the PC.

Higher-end graphics cards use over 100 Watts of power when you’re playing a game or editing a video. Hard drives can consume 35 watts or more even when the drive is idle because the platters are still spinning. They consume even more when they read or write data. Almost everything your computer uses consumes a certain amount of power. The more components your computer has, the more power you consume. Some high-end systems eat up around 400 Watts, while others might even consume up to and over 750 Watts per hour. 

Turn It Off!

Computers are useless without someone at the keyboard. If you’re going to spend more than an hour away from the keyboard, turn the computer off. It takes only like 2 minutes for a computer to turn back on anyway. You might not smile now, but look at your electric bill a month from now. Do I see a grin? :)

Let’s say your computer uses 110 Watts on average. This was the average power consumption of a computer back in the late 90s. Now, let’s say you’re home for 6 hours of the day before you go to sleep, and you always turn on the computer when you get home until it’s bedtime. You’re consuming 660 Watts per day, and most of that time, you’re probably busy doing laundry, cooking, watching football, or whatever it is you do when you’re away from the computer.

Now, let’s say you spend about two hours per day away from the computer while it’s on. You’re practically wasting 220 watts per day. In 2011, the national average price of electricity is around 12 cents per kilowatt hour. You’re wasting 2 cents per day, at that rate. It adds up, though, to just below $10 a year. Now, consider that computers consume more now than they did before.

Change the computer’s average usage to 400 Watts, and run the same scenario. Your daily usage is 2.4 kilowatts. That’s 28 cents per day, or $105 per year. That’s a much higher sum, right?

Leaving your computer unattended for two hours per day wastes 0.8 kilowatts per day, or roughly 9.6 cents per day. That’s $35 per year, minus taxes and hidden fees that electrical service companies just love to charge you. If you’re really concerned about saving money, turn off the computer when you don’t use it.

Remove Extra Devices

If you’re not using your printer, turn it off. USB drives and other peripherals use a bit of power as well. If you remove them from their USB ports, you save a bit on electricity. If you know your way around the computer’s hardware, remove components that you don’t use, like network cards, modems, extra graphics cards, and hard drives. Here’s another trick: If your computer has two smaller hard drives, get one bigger one and merge the data from both drives into that big one. You consume a slightly smaller amount of power this way.

If you have more than one optical (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray) drive, what do you need both for? Unless you run a copy studio, you should have only one optical drive.

Windows Power Options

If you don’t want to go through the inconvenience of having to boot up your computer every time you return from some other household duty, you can always change the power options in Windows to minimize the amount of power the computer uses while it’s snoozing idly. In your computer’s control panel, there’s an icon that says “Hardware and Sound.” Click it, and then click “Power Options.” You should end up in a screen like this:

Under the additional plans, select “Power saver.” This plan turns the display off if you’re away from the keyboard for more than 5 minutes. If your processor doesn’t have a large load of tasks to do, it’s underclocked and underpowered accordingly. The hard disk turns off if it doesn’t see any requests for information. Basically, everything on your computer stands still waiting for you to come back. If, after 15 minutes, you haven’t returned, the computer puts itself in “sleep mode”. which basically retains all memory, but shuts off most essential components. In this state, once you turn on the computer, it will power up much faster and almost instantly boot back into the state you left it in.

If you don’t feel comfortable with the power saver plan, you can always choose “Balanced”, which will restrict your computer’s power consumption much less. After all, you shouldn’t let your comfort slide down for a couple of bucks saved per year.

Consider Purchasing More Green Hardware

If you’re not much of a gamer or graphics designer, you don’t need a high-end graphics card to power your computer; neither do you need a hard drive that spins faster than 7200 RPMs. Be on the lookout for greener computers and peripherals coming out of the woodwork. They can save you plenty of money and still perform just like any other computer. If you’re really into saving every cent you can, consider getting a netbook or a smaller laptop. They both eat up less Watts per hour than your average desktop computer.

High-end hardware isn’t always the key to making your computer run faster. If you behave conservatively with your system, defragment your hard drive, and rid your computer of unnecessary software, it’ll run much faster.

Related Posts:

• Windows 8 to Shove Aero Away
• Free Giveaway: Blu-ray Decrypter
• Ask MTE: Missing Windows Media Center, Thumbnails Missing In Explorer, Remove Games Icon And Many More (Week 16)
• How To Schedule Backup And Synchronization Tasks In Windows

So what can you do about it?

PowerTOP is an application that allows you to view information about programs that are misbehaving while your computer is idle. With this information, you can then make changes and optimize your computer to squeeze more juice out of your laptop battery.

Installation

For Ubuntu and Debian based system

sudo apt-get install powertop

or simply click here to install

Running PowerTOP

In the terminal, type

sudo powertop

PowerTOP runs itself inside the terminal, so don’t expect a fanciful GUI here.

On the top of the screen, you can see the two columns showing the C-states and P-states.

The C-state refers to the idle state where your CPU is not doing anything. The higher C-state the CPU is running at, the better it is.

On the other hand, the P-state shows the operational state, or the frequency the CPU is running at most of the time. The lower frequency the CPU runs, the lesser power it will require. From the screenshot above, you can see that my laptop is running at C3 and 800MHz most of the time. (More info on the C-states and P-states can be found here)

At the bottom half is where you can see the applications that are actively running in the background. The number of wakeup refers to the number of time the application refreshes itself to check for instruction. The fewer wakeup an application makes, the better it is.

PowerTOP Suggestions

It is pretty useless if you know the cause of the problem, but not the solution to it. One thing that impresses me in PowerTOP is that it provides improvement suggestions as well as the instruction to implement the solution. It even comes with a shortcut key for those who are not familiar with the command line.

For example, in my laptop, PowerTOP detects that the USB drive is taking up plenty of resources and it suggested me to enable the USB auto-suspend mode. Even though I have completely no idea on how to do that in the terminal, I can simply press U on my keyboard and get PowerTOP to do the job for me.

Isn’t that cool!

Once you have resolved one issue, PowerTOP will continue to prompt you for the next issue, until it resolves all the issues that it can find.

Conclusion

If you are already power-managing your laptop, PowerTOP might not be able to improve your battery life to a great extent, but for those casual users who have paid no attention to such detail in the past, I am sure PowerTOP will be able to help you to get the most out of your battery; provided your battery is still functional.

Related Posts:

• How to Fix Low Battery Power And Overheating Issue In Ubuntu 11.10
• How To Control Your CPU Frequency In Ubuntu
• GeoGebra, For Dynamic Geometry On Linux
• How to Integrate Skype With Ubuntu Unity

In your Ubuntu, you can easily switch your CPU frequency via the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor Gnome-applets.

On the top panel of your desktop, right click your mouse and select “Add to Panel”

In the window that open, scroll down and look for the entry “CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor“. Select the entry and click the Add button to add to the panel.

You should see something like this:

Next, open up your terminal and type:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

You will see the following screen.

Select OK

When prompt if you want to start with root privilege, select Yes.

This will bring you back to your terminal.

Now back to your CPU frequency scaling applet on the top panel, when you click on the icon, it will display a list of frequency that you can choose from. There are also various modes that you can use to allow the system to auto-control the frequency of your CPU.

Depending on the configuration of your laptop, most Intel and AMD CPU are set to be Ondemand mode, which means it will run at the lowest frequency unless you are doing intensive tasks that require the extra power. However, when you are on your battery, it is best to set to Powersave mode so that it will always run at the lowest frequency.

What other ways do you use to save your battery power?

Related Posts:

• How to Integrate Skype With Ubuntu Unity
• How to Install Java Runtime In Ubuntu 12.04
• How to Connect to A VPN In Ubuntu [Quick Tips]
• How to Upgrade to Gimp 2.8 in Ubuntu