Maximum Green: 5 Freeware Apps That Save the Environment (And Your Cash!)
Maximum Green: 5 Freeware Apps That Save the Environment (And Your Cash!)
Posted 04/27/2009 at 8:30am
| by David Murphy
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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!
More like this
cajundweeb
January 02, 2012 at 2:16pm
Edison is no longer available from Verdiem- they've discontinued it and are only supporting a paid program Called Surveyor 6. Please see their website for details.
OhSoCheesy
May 22, 2009 at 6:59pm
I don't want a poluted planet either, but the whole global warming is BS. I remember in the 70's Time magazine claimed we were headed for the next Ice Age. Now its Global Warming. Just because some nut said it enough times everyone says it like its fact. BS...OK...I'm done. Thanks for the article though! :)
dwr50
April 28, 2009 at 6:29am
will let you run a TV and computer 24-7 for free. That's what I do in my RV.
Acer Aspire 5610z,Vista HP, No problems with Vista... so far, but I'm learning Linux, just in case.
Acer Aspire 5315-2153, $348 Walmart Special,Mandriva Linux 2008.1 Spring Edition,VirtualBox 1.6.4
compro01
April 27, 2009 at 2:56pm
local cooling is amusingly inaccuate on my laptop (HP tx2512). it estimates the power use at 139W. The power brick is rated for 65W.
xveganx
April 27, 2009 at 11:57am
Hey great article thanx.
As someone who is both environmentally conscious and a PC power user I very much appreciate articles such as this.
jcollins
April 27, 2009 at 11:21am
You know, being an information junkie, what I would like to see is an easy, cheap way of integrating monitoring into each and every power socket in my residence, with it cascading through UPS's, power strips, to identify (through some app) how much each device is using on a real time/hourly/weekly/monthly basis (raw numbers plus graphs). You can do that to an extent with Kill-A-Watts on every socket, etc. But it's not whole house, and it isn't cheap for the whole house... Now that'd be cool...
ericzombie
April 27, 2009 at 10:44am
As I read whatever few comments there are on this article, it sounds like most PC enthusiasts don't give a crap about the environment. Which kinda surprises me. Why can't we have efficiency of POWER when we want POWER and small, quiet, low power, when we just surf the web or stream MP3s? I really liked when AMD had that mobo that had the built in integrated video for switching off the main card when it was't necessary, then when it sensed the demand for GPU cycles, it flipped the card back on. What ever happened to that technology?
I just tried out that Local Cooling program, to see what I could do, and it was crap. It didn't work very well on my Vista installation, it was designed for before XP when there wasn't decent energy saving controls, and it's been unsupported for a number of years according to complaints on their own website.
If MaxPC wants to tout power saving tech, I'm DEFINITELY all for that, but when they google search for a few "green" programs and then toss them on their page like a blog post, without ever trying them out..... It makes me a little disappointed.... I love MaxPC, and I trust their knowledge and experiece... So don't cheap me out like that :/ I guess thanks for looking at something to save electricity (and $$$ for those of us who pay electric bills).
TheMurph
April 27, 2009 at 10:56am
While you can indeed run the same power-savings tasks in vista that programs like Edison and LocalCooling provide, you won't be able to physically see just how much energy or money you're saving in doing so. Did you try the analysis features as well? That, in itself, is a neat touch that's worth a cursory installation, at least.
But, to your point, if you want to fiddle with these settings in Vista yourself, go right ahead. Some people don't want to do that, aren't smart enough to do that, or simply want an application that choose the selections for them.
Sorry you feel "cheaped out" by the selections on the weekly freeware roundup. Not every application is perfect in every scenario a la LocalCooling and Vista, but these are just options that you can install if you deisre the features they provide. If working through the solutions yourself is more your deal, then sweet. Check out some of the other apps on the roundup and toss LocalCooling by the wayside -- it won't hurt my feelings at all. :D
clark1566
April 27, 2009 at 1:55pm
Just my two cents but I am not sure the version of LocalCooling you show in the screen shot and the one the download link takes you to are the same. I checked out UniBlue and they do not even make a program called LocalCooling, only the garden variety system tune up, defrag blah blah blah stuff. If you go to LocalCooling.com there is a download link for a power saving program there.....Edison. So somewhere your info is getting crossed up. I did install the version of LocalCooling that the article links to and it does indeed work with Vista 32bit and give you an accurate reading of your power consumption but you can not make any changes or adjustments to it. But I do agree with you that being able to track power saving is worth the install alone.
TheMurph
April 27, 2009 at 2:47pm
UniBlue is the parent company that ran the LocalCooling application and efforts.
The LocalCooling Web site suggests that you grab the Edison program, as UniBlue is no longer supporting LocalCooling.
rhardy99
June 08, 2009 at 2:25pm
Looks like the version that the link (snapfiles.com) on MaxPC's website is for version 1.04 and if you look at Murph's picture of Localcooling it shows 2.0, so I did a search and found 2.0 on softmedia.com (see link below).
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Miscellaneous/Local-Cooling.shtml
Hope this helps!! Maybe the newer version will work better with Vista (at least it says it is supported on 2.0)
I have a kill-a-watt meter to look at how much power is being used also, but to use it porperly you can only plug one device (PC or monitor for example) in at a time and shouldn't use a surge strip (if my memory serves my right) and the LocalCooling app should give you an idea of all your power use (HDD, CPU, monitor, etc.). As far as accuracy, maybe that could be a future article?!?! I would like to be more responsible for my energy use/waste and this app could be very helpful.
Thanks for the great article!
cajundweeb
January 02, 2012 at 2:22pm
Thanks for the tip. I tried to put Edison back on my PC after refreshing everything, but Verdiem no longer supports Edison,so I'm giving LocalCooling a whirl to see how it works.
Digital-Storm
April 27, 2009 at 10:33am
Agreed. Going green is stupid. How much of the enviroment do you really save? What if your pc is running off a solar panel?
TheMurph
April 27, 2009 at 10:46am
I would like to point out the many references to "going green saves you money" in this article. While I didn't want to be too obvious, you can "go green" for purely selfish reasons--like saving money on your electricity bill. Unless, of course, you really have a compelling need to leave your PC running at full-blast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And if you do, well, the aformentioned programs will tell you just how much money you're throwing down the drain.
SplashPants
April 27, 2009 at 9:18am
Potentially advancing scientific breakthroughs using folding at home OR Saving the planet by turning off my computer.....
:(
nekollx
April 27, 2009 at 10:05am
you dont need your monitor to fold, or help even your hdd at full bore, or hell the cpu at 100%.
So you could turn off the monitor at x time, and depending on the program and drive (like a WD green 2TB) ramp down from 7200 to 5400 (and if you have multiple drives sleep the others)
and even rank down the CPU utilization at x time
You can fold and be green, granted not as freen as those that dont fold but hey your savingthe environment and humanity, can they say their curing cancer as well?
TheMurph
April 27, 2009 at 10:48am
I couldn't have said it better myself. That's why I inclued both Edison and LocalCooling on the list -- if you need to keep your PC on, but want to save money, use Edison. If you don't mind shutting your PC down when you aren't using it, use LocalCooling. And if you want to turn it back on, investigate Wake-on-LAN.
*hums "Circle of Life" from the Lion King*
jcollins
April 27, 2009 at 9:01am
Green is not compatible with folding. I assume the fanatical greenies are against folding, since it is for the benefit of humanity. Healthy humanity = more humanity = more power useage = less greening of the Earth...
benvoliothefirst
April 27, 2009 at 8:54am
Some helpful apps here, and I don't remember reading any other articles with this kind of information recently on Maximum PC. Although sneaking that one app in that keeps your hard drive spun up all the time was probably bending the rules a bit much. Also, what's the difference between the first two? Seems like they do pretty much the same thing to me.
TheMurph
April 27, 2009 at 10:58am
Edison = doesn't integrate system shut-downs into the mix.
Localcooling = doesn't play well with vista, but offers an extended "educated guess" as to what your components are eating up power-wise.
Honestly, both programs are probably a bit too simple for power users, but if you want a one-stop place to adjust your power settings (that isn't the power settings option on your control panel), you can try out either one... depending on your OS.
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