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Windows XP and the energy jihad
Monday, October 17 2005
I was up at 7am this morning, indicating the 25 hour of my biological clock is still making single hour adjustments each day.
Today it was cool and windy and not conducive to the collection of much in the way of solar energy. I focused instead on the electrical aspect of the energy conservation equation, taking advantage of the fact that Gretchen was out working for most of the day.
For years now Gretchen has been running Windows NT 4.0 on her basement office computer. It's a nice stable OS, and because it's behind the household firewall and runs Mozilla, I haven't felt the need to install any patches, updates, or virus software. It's the closest thing to an appliance computer in the house. It's hard to justify tinkering with such a fool-proof setup, but my new awareness of energy waste forces my hand. NT 4.0 has little or no energy conservation features built in. So today I decided to "upgrade" (oh, how I hate that word!) the computer to Windows XP. Since the computer is set up so simply and since Gretchen uses a web-based email account, the change was very easy. But, as always, there were complications. The main reason to do this upgrade was to get XP's power-saving "Standby" mode. But wouldn't you know, the only available video driver for the motherboard-based video circuitry was incompatible with XP's Standby mode. The computer is a six year old IBM Aptiva, so I shouldn't be surprised. But it would have been good to know this stuff before beginning the "upgrade."
By the way, I'm not really sure what state a computer is really in when it's in "Standby." Does it continue to monitor the network connection in case there's a request for a shared file?
I went to bed after 10pm, thereby advancing my biological clock even closer to the magic place where it likes to be.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?051017 feedback
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