That's a lot of money and energy being wasted only to keep your PC running. Besides the environmental impact, who really likes to waste money?
Admittedly I don't think much about it at all. I leave my laptop running overnight because I know it'll take five minutes or more to get things going in the morning -- not just booting up, but launching the various apps I start the day with, downloading my overnight email, filtering out the spam, and otherwise "getting settled."NOTE FROM JOHN: Ever since I bought my own place I've gotten way more conscious about energy use (amazing what paying your own electric bill does to inspire virtue). One thing I noticed - with my Mac laptop, at least, I can set the laptop to "better energy savings," which basically shuts the thing down to a minimum of energy use when I'm away for more than a few minutes. And to start it back up, I hit any key, and the computer is back within seconds. Are there any PC experts out there who can share energy-saving tips for a PC? Another energy-saving tip I learned - lots of appliances, when they're "off," if they're still plugged in, they might be hogging a lot of electricity.
But all the power wasted while computers are sitting idle overnight adds up, and one study has finally tried to measure it. The tally: An estimated $2.8 billion wasted on excess energy costs each year in the U.S. alone.
On a CO2 basis, that's 20 million tons of carbon dioxide, about the amount produced by 4 million cars on the road.
