Be Excellent To Each Other

How much does it cost to run a average PC in an office for a day...


Just after a rough ball park figure...

Thanks

Say 100W average (fairly powerful PC, big monitor, but sleeping some of the time).

So 2.4kWh over 24 hours.

So 24p at business rate electricity price (10p/unit).

That's ballpark - to get a more accurate answer you'll need to measure a representative PC in actual use.

Cheers...

Is there such a thing as an energy saving PC?

Yes you build one using low powered components less hard drives etc etc.

Most PCs have loads of energy saving features these days, but a lot depends on how it's being used.

Small form factors PCs with laptop CPUs, fanless motherboards etc will also tend to naturally take less power.

An actual laptop (not a desk replacement one) will also be good - maybe 30W in use.

What's the application?

Building is not an option, do Dell, HP, IBM, etc offer such a beast?

That sort of thing...

Dell Optiplex is good. But what's it for?

Also, I chose my iMac because it had pretty low power consumption.

I might have said that we do outsourcing of companies IT.

I just thought we could save them money if we used energy efficent PCs

Obvious innit! Don't you already do that?

What's just as important is allowing the machines to properly suspend / hibernate at night, rather than having a policy of insisting they stay on all the time just in case IT decide they want to do an upgrade or backup process or something. And lock the settings to switch off the monitor and sleep the computer after 10 minutes rather than have it display a stupid corporate screensaver.


If you're proposing this make sure you do a comparison first between what they have now and something like that Vostro - otherwise it'll sound like you don't know what you're talking about

Ours all automatically shut down at 8pm (with the obvious exceptions).

We provide Dell Optiplexs 600 and 700 series... I will have a look into it..


We do provided all the windows and bios energy savings we can do.. I just though the actual pc could be looked at..

OK, so, generic desktops. Yes, you'll have to just trawl the manufacturers website and compare the specs and price and so on. Or ask them the question.

As I say, most of the Optiplexes are already fairly good (because you aren't the first person to think of this). The cheaper / less powerful ones are better.

If we are using the most effiecent PC's then nothing is lost by looking..

Wow I'm glad I'm the only one with the admin password to my PC at work. That would really fuck me up.

We use power on Lans so we can force downloads even if the bos is off..


Dudley how will it fuck you up by the monitor shutting off?

We do it properly - allowing scheduled nightly maintenance windows for both admin work (deploying software/patches or gathering inventory) or dev work (compiles). Outside of those windows, the machines hibernates, although if you're still there working into the night you just tell it to get bent and it gives up until tomorrow.

Thus breaking any and all network connections. 10 minutes wouldn't just fuck me up if it was overnight, it would fuck me up going out to lunch, going to talk to a co-worker.

Then again, this is me, I don't even have a screensaver.

I would not sleep the computer unless nothing is running on it..

While I agree about the sleeping thing, there are security issues with that.
Unless you're computer just locks itself.

Ours have a GPO to set the screensaver on and lock the machine after 15 mins of key inactivity..

Why not set it to turn the monitor off instead? You still need to put a password in to unlock it.

That's a pretty advanced monitor

The monitor will power down after a bit..

Yeah it has a keyboard attached and I can talk to imaginary people on it. Clever stuff really

I bet they're all cunts.

Nah, they voted me to be one of their 'elders'.



Oh.

Typical Hippy.

We can't pass MAcs on to our customers as they are too expensive..

I doubt that, as we provide more than just PCs ...

Mouse mats too?

Keep going!!

There's never nothing running on any windows PC. Mine has 70 processes running right now.



True, but there's nothing on my PC any domain user can't see from their desk anyway. I usually lock it out of habit but my password would be incredibly guessable to any other user.

You know what I mean when I say stuf is not running... ie word, powerpoint, other software etc.... YOU KNOW APPLICATIONS!! and only then if they are prcessing somethign above idle...

I am glad you take you companies security so lightly

How are you deciding what an application is and monitoring what's "idle", it's not as simple as you'd think at all.

Logmein's system tray thing for example does absolutely zero, until I need my remote access.

Can't you just go off CPU and memory usage?

New logmein (coming soon) can wake some PCs up.

PCs that are behind switches that allow through the magic packet, which is practically none of them by default.

I have access to the switch my PC is behind, though

Yeah - most people don't.

And do you have access to all the others between that one and the proxy? And will the proxy forward it?

The only things you need to be careful not to interrupt would be compilation (and developers are going to have the admin rights on their own machine anyway, so can set it how they like), and possibly downloading or copying large files from the internet or over the local network.

Would a Windows machine auto-sleep if it was in the middle of a load of file writes?

Other than that, for the vast majority of users, it really doesn't matter if the machine sleeps when they're away from it, because they come back pretty much instantly and seamlessly.

Yes, and "don't know yet". The building proxy might be a problem.

Plenty of idle processes use memory (My SQL server for instance is using several hundred MB) and as I just said, logmein for instance does no processing until I connect from elsewhere.

It's a special case I'd admit.

As an aside, does anyone know why the "GPU Diode" on my iMac is currently reading 52 degrees even though the display is off?

Is the magic packet an ICMP or something?

No, it's below the IP layer, down in the MAC layer itself. It's a single ethernet frame with the MAC ID of the computer you are trying to wake up and a few identity bits. Consumer bridging firewall/routers need to handle that specially or it won't work at all.

Ah. Good luck with that then, logmein.