power

Follow these PCAnswers tips to set up efficient power management techniques to bring down your carbon footprint or squeeze more battery life from your laptop!

1. Ditch the screensaver
Screensavers look pretty, but modern LCD monitors don’t need them to protect the screen – a better energy saving technique is to set the monitor to switch itself off after the same period you’d normally allow the screensaver to kick in – say five or ten minutes. The added bonus is that you’ll be extending the monitor’s life too. Set this from the Power Options Control Panel.

2. Hard drive use
Excessive use of the hard drive consumes more power as well as affects performance – make sure your drive is regularly defragged, add more RAM to your PC to reduce the load Windows places on your drive and let the drive spin down to conserve energy around the same time as your monitor powers off. ... read more »