Saving power by changing computing habits and hardware

[zjrog]

I can't find the link right now... But someoen DID want more for his EEEPC... He added internally, Bluetooth, SD cards for more stroage, GPS, and a ton of other things too. I'll see if I can find it must be on my PC @ work...

Originally Posted by LostCause

I second the EEEPC, minimalist computing at its best. Hopefully the next generation will come with the Diamondville chip (2W TDP), a 9" screen, and the same form factor/price. What else could you need?

- Lost Cause

[Gone4]

I've actually been really looking into a Nokia n810 for most of my uses and a light desktop for everything else. The n810 comes with sd card slots, gps, bluetooth, and other jazz.

[Gone4]

There was a discussion today about this same topic over at Slashdot primarily linking to an article on Ars.

[NoCO2]

I saw that on my RSS reader this morning, good article. Makes some very valid points and again re-affirms what was mentioned earlier that it's really not economical to just up and change your computer for the sake of saving electricity. However, I still hold that if you are looking for a new computer anyway, this is something that should be considered.

[roflwaffle]

Originally Posted by NoCO2

The point I think with the Pico-ITX system is if you are looking for a new computer, these are pretty inexpensive compared to comparable other ITX or ATX systems.

Not really... You can buy something out of the box and ready to use (uses twice as much power), so no need to to buy disk/CF storage, or ram, or etc... For $60 less than what that barebones kit costs. So even if you went with something totally premade, versus this, you would still need to spend one or two hundred bucks extra to have a functional system.

Originally Posted by NoCO2

Also note, that, if you are even the slightest bit computer savvy, you can install and use Ubuntu Linux which is the best distribution out right now in my opinion. In 6 years, you would probably have to upgrade your computer at least twice to keep up with just the windows operating system's, system requirements, however, I can almost guarantee that if you are using ubuntu, you will never need more system then you started with, even if you upgrade to the new release every 8 months. So keeping that system running for 6 years would not be completely un-realistic. Yea, you wouldn't see the savings for that much time, but still, 6 years to break even is better then never breaking even with another "less expensive" system.

Over the same time frame, don't you think that something like this will drop in price, or something even better will pop up, far before the six years are up? I think we would still be better off, at least from the perspective of reducing Carbon emissions, if we threw together something for a third or quarter of the price that use twice as much power, because we would still have two or three hundred bucks left over to reduce Carbon emissions via some other avenue, which, so long as we haven't exhausted all the other measures we could take to reduce use/increase efficiency, could go a lot farther than saving 20W when the computer is on.