Avi Geiger (Hardware Architect at Microsoft) obsesses about power and battery life for laptops. For Ignite he directed his power obsession at the home computer.
A 100 Watt Lightbulb costs the average American household about 7 dollars a month or ~10% of your electric bill. A standard desktop computer left on all the time is the same as a 100 Watt light bulb or 10% of an American household. Do the math, turning off your computer could save a lot of money and trees.
WorldChanging Seattle has a good post paraphrasing Avi’s talk (if you’d rather just read it) and points to an older post on Coding Horror about this same topic.
This video and others from Ignite Seattle are available on Blip.tv and were recorded by Bryan Zug. I’ll be posting select videos from Ignite periodically. During the second Ignite we had an issue with sound, sorry for the buzz.