The Right Way

Portable storage devices today can be as small as a quarter and still carry gigabytes of data. Devices like flash drives are extremely convenient and a critical asset in both our personal and professional lives. Programmers have taken advantage of the popularity of removable media and created software that can operate independently of the operating system’s registry. PortableApps are applications that can be used without having to install them on each computer you use.

They don’t leave traces or make any changes to the computer they’re plugged into. All settings and changes are saved to the portable drive. PortableApps will work on Windows XP or later and there are equivalent programs for Linux such as www.portools.com. Most of the sites’ programs are open source and all can be downloaded at no cost. There are also no restrictions on the type of portable drive needed. The applications can be installed to memory cards, flash drives, hard drives, and even to media players.

The list of programs available includes Firefox, Google Chrome, OpenOffice, and even a few games such as Sudoku and Warzone 2100. ClamWin and SpyDLLRemover can be download to remove viruses and spyware. There’s also a menu that can be set to launch when you plug in your drive to help you access your applications.

The benefits are extremely useful when on a library or public computer where changes to the computer system is either frowned upon or not allowed. It is also helpful that browser bookmarks, history, and add-ons are stored on and loaded from the removable drive.

An LCD most likely consumes between 25 and 35 watts, and in California that translates to 90 cents and $1.26 a month respectively. The best thing you can do is adjust your monitor to reduce eye strain, and if you do it right, then you may save some power in the process. In a typical setup, you will be able to adjust the brightness and contrast settings on your monitor, although your video card or chipset may provide you with additional brightness, contrast, and color correction features.

The brightness setting on your LCD determines almost all of its power usage, and by adjusting it, you are almost directly adjusting the power it consumes. However, to minimize eye strain, you should adjust the brightness so that the monitor screen appears just as bright as the rest of the room. Your eyes will quickly strain if there is a substantial difference – such as when you stare at a computer screen at night with the lights off.

Changing the contrast setting on a monitor does very little to affect power usage, but it can greatly reduce eye strain by making it easier for your eyes to distinguish between colors. For example, by increasing the contrast you can make black text on a gray background appear sharper rather than blend in. Contrast changes can also make the screen appear brighter without actually changing its brightness.

Monitors vary in the effect of their contrast settings, but higher contrast generally means a brighter screen with colors blending together. And lower contrast generally means a darker screen with sharper colors. And if your monitor’s settings are too limited to properly adjust the screen, you can also check to see if your graphics driver provides additional options. In Windows, you can right click on the desktop to look for Intel’s “Graphics Properties,” nVidia’s “Control Panel,” or ATI’s “Control Center.”

You might be surprised to hear that electronic devices still consume power even when they’re turned off – pretty much anything that plugs into a wall outlet does. This power is referred to as “standby power,” and it’s commonly used to provide some sort of feature – like an infrared receiver listening for a remote, a computer waiting for the ON button to be pressed, or a DVD player displaying the current time. However, this standby load often provides no benefits at all.

Watts are used to measure the rate at which power is consumed, and power usage over time is usually measured (and billed for) in kilowatt hours (kW-h). The cost varies greatly depending on where you live, but the U.S. national average is about 12 cents per kW-h. In California, the average price for residential power is 15 cents and commercial power is one cent cheaper. The average American household (in 2007) consumed 936 kilowatt hours each month.

Although most power is used by appliances such as air conditioning systems and refrigerators, your electronics do consume a significant amount of power. But how much exactly? To answer that question, we’ve prepared the following table showing the typical power usage of computers, monitors, and peripherals.

	Off / Standby	Sleep	Not in Use	In Use	Peak
Desktop PC	2	3-4	60-75	88-105	120
Wide 19" LCD	2	2	2	27	36
Std 17" LCD	1	1	1	25	36
Small Laserjet	1	4	4	835	835
Laptop, 15" LCD	4-5	5	31	45	70
PC Speakers	2	N/A	2-3	4	12
10/100 Switch	N/A	N/A	N/A	3	3
VoIP Phone	N/A	N/A	2	2	2

So if your computer idles at 65 watts, then it would consume at least 46.8 kilowatt hours in a month (30 days) if you never turned it off. And if you live in California where power is 15 cents per kW-h, then you’d be adding $7.02 to your electric bill. Of course the cost will be a lot more depending on how much you use the monitor and peripherals, but at a minimum, your printer, monitor, switch, and phone will add another 14 watts for a total of 79 watts and $8.53.

Let’s say you wanted to lower expenses and you kept your computer and peripherals off at night by turning the power strip off (which stops almost all standby power usage). If your night is eight hours long, this would only save you $2.84 each month. However, if you shut down your computer and didn’t turn off the power strip – thereby losing some power – you would still save $2.27. The power lost at night due to standby power modes is only 57 cents in this case – not even worth considering.

Even so, a few vendors are marketing “smart” power strips which can shut off some outlets when power usage on a control outlet gets low enough. So if your computer is on the control outlet and it goes to sleep, then the Smart Strip would turn off all power to peripherals on the other outlets. In our typical setup, these peripherals consumed only 14 watts of standby power, and even assuming the computer would be off or asleep for 15 hours each day, the most you could save in a month would be 95 cents. Hardly enough to justify the expense – both of money and energy – of a Smart Strip.