Green. It's all the rage in the technology world nowadays. You've got green hard drives. Green laptops. Green desktops. Green printers (with soy ink!). Green displays. Green power strips. Louis Armstrong saw skies of blue and clouds of white, but any geek worth his electric bill sees nothing but green. It's the color of the environment, and it's the color of all the cash you'll be saving by using green-themed applications to curtail your out-of-control PC habits. Or normal PC habits, because anyone can benefit from the open-source and freeware applications we're profiling in this week's software roundup. Best of all, most of these applications automatically take care of your green actions for you--set them up to run, and you won't have to lift a finger to tap into increased savings and Captain Planet-style goodwill. 

Edison

What it does: This helpful little freeware application lets you establish schedules for "work time" and "non-work" time. From there, you tell the application what kind of energy-savings (and money savings) you want to achieve, and the application automatically calculates and sets the appropriate times for turning off your display, powering down your hard drive, and slapping your computer into standby mode after a certain span of inactivity.  It's a basic, simple way to achieve energy-savings on your computer.  Best of all, the application calculates out exactly how much money, energy, and carbon-dioxide you'll be saving.  If that's not inspirational, we don't know what is.

Download it here!

LocalCooling

What it does: LocalCooling is the Maximum PC of energy-saving applications.  Unlike Edison, LocalCooling performs a fairly thorough analysis of your PC's components to give you a rundown of how much power your supercharged rig is eating up. Once you've cried Mother Earth's tears, you can select one of three predefined power-saving options that, like Edison, set times for the automatic turn-off of your monitor, the spinning down of your hard drives, and the complete shutting down of your PC.  You can also customize your own times if you want to take a more hands-on approach to reducing your energy footprint (and electric bill).  Select your intervals and LocalCooling will estimate how much you could save!

Download it here!

NoSleepHD

What it does: Okay. We'll confess.  This application is the complete antithesis of power-savings.  But just in case you secretly harbor a deep dislike of your planet and/or have a wad of cash to blow for usability's sake, NoSleepHD is your ticket.  This application runs in your system tray and keeps your hard drives--internal and external--from spinning down into sleep cycles. NoSleepHD presents a crude solution to the problem, as the program writes a super-tiny file to your drives at specific intervals to keep them spinning forever.  But hey, it reduces those precious seconds of spin-up time to zero.  Take that, Earth.

Download it here!

Magic Packet Sender

What it does: It's often tempting to leave the ol' computer on during the day so you can dial back into your home system from work to access your files, control your webcam, and download things that you shouldn't really be looking at during a typical 9-to-5 day.  Yeah, that's right.  But even if these scenarios don't fit your typical use, there's really no reason to leave your computer on during the day just because.  If you use Wake-on-LAN functionality to turn your PC on remotely, then you'll want to use Magic Packet Sender to process the tiny commands you send home to turn the system on in the first place.  And if you have no idea what Wake-on-LAN even is, well... download this application and take a read!

Download it here!

GreenPrint World Edition

What it does: You know what's annoying?  When you're printing a Web page or a document, and all of your pages come out correctly save for the last one, which is usually just a small paragraph of unnecessary text, or a URL, or some miscellaneous element that wastes an entire page of paper.  GreenPrint World Edition eliminates this frustration by scanning the documents you're about to print, then automatically removing these unimportant pages from the mix.  And if you think that this issue is so miniscule as to not warrant attention or save any energy whatsoever, that's why this helpful application keeps track of all the wasted pages you would have printed without its guidance.  And that's why we love it--an energy-saving procedure that backs up its usefulness with raw facts.

Download it here!