Google Goes Black, An Easy Way To Use Less Electricity With Computers
By Rich Menga on Mar 31, 2008 in PCMech Wire | comments(0)
Many of you out there probably noticed that Google went black in an effort to raise people’s awareness about energy conservation.
One of the absolute easiest ways in the world to use less electricity with a computer is with laptop use for three reasons:
- Laptops are by very nature designed to use less power.
- Obviously when you’re using a laptop on battery power you’re not drawing from wall current.
- Power supplies for laptops are far less electricity hungry. For example, I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 built back in 2005. Its power supply is only 65-watt. The one in my desktop PC is far greater.
- If using wall current, with a laptop you’re plugging in one less item to said wall (no LCD monitor to plug in since it’s built-in to the laptop itself).
All modern laptops (about since wi-fi cards became standard items) should have a low-wattage power brick that only uses the bare minimum to power/charge the unit when using wall current.
If you currently have a laptop and want to know what the wattage rating is, look at the power brick (the thing you use to charge the laptop / plug it into the wall); it’s printed directly on it in plain sight.
