bg
  • Buzz this!
  • Dela
Published: March 2nd, 2008

Yesterday we got this email from Matt Bentley:

Changing Microsoft XP power scheme settings determines whether or not power-saving CPU features are activated in a machine when idle.

All modern desktop CPU’s past the AMD Athlon XP and the Intel Pentium 4 (ie. AMD A64 & Intel Core and upwards) have some kind of speed-stepping feature built into them, which is utilised via Windows XP’s power management settings as per Orthogonal Thought’s blog.

What does this mean? Well, basically, if we all switch our desktop computer’s power scheme to ‘Laptop/Portable’, our computers will drop the cpu voltage and frequency when idle (provided the motherboard supports it, and most do), saving 30w (on average) – it’s like switching to an energy-saver lightbulb, essentially – and has absolutely no performance impact when not running idle.

Learn more: Intel SpeedStep, Windows XP, and confusing Power Profiles

Simon Leufstedt
Simon Leufstedt is the founder and editor of Green Blog – an environment blog with authors from around the world. He is also the admin of Enviro Space - a place to meet, discuss and interact with other people who share your interests and ideas. Simon has previously studied Global Environmental Justice and is currently busy working with the Swedish TckTckTck organisation and learning everything there is to know about Human Ecology at the Lund University in Sweden.
Advertisement

Related Posts

Advertisement
RSS

Subscribe to Green Blog

Green Blog has daily updates and posts from authors around the world. Get our latest posts, commentaries and articles by RSS-feed or by adding your Email to our newsletter.

Learn More

This blog post has been marked with the following tags. Click on one of the tags to learn more:


You can also learn more about this topic by browsing the post's category: Science & Technology

Archives

Browse our archive of over +2 years worth of blog posts, articles and commentaries:

bg
bg

Join our green community! Meet new people, discuss various topics and make new friends that share your interests.

Comment Guideline

Comments with profanity, personal attacks or objectionable material will be edited or deleted. Feel free to refute someone's points or offer counter arguments, but please do not engage in name calling.

You can also customize your links and add some photos to your comments. Green Blog supports the following HTML tags: <a>, <b>, <i>, <u>, <em>, <p>, <blockquote>, <br>, <strong>, <strike>, <img>

We will show Disqus avatars and/or Gravatars next to your name.

Advertisement
Your Ad Here
  • I've been performing tests on several Intel Core 2 Duo machines over the last few weeks. Enabling laptop mode to turn on speed step seems like it would be a significant cost savings, but unfortunately it really doesn't do much. The default stepping level is still very high on our machines (2Ghz machines drop to 1.6Ghz). This results in a savings from 2 watts to 3 watts on average. You can get custom software out there that allows you to set a greater stepping range, but unfortunately that isn't something built into Windows.
  • Dan
    What a great tip and something I'd never thought of!

    If you're at a networked environment then it's not possible to natively roll this out to all computers using a Group Policy as it's not support by XP. But I've found a way to do it thanks to an add-on service from the Energy Star Group. Details are on Microsoft Technet

    Dan
blog comments powered by Disqus
bg
bg
Powered by WordPress. Green Blog is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.
Creative Commons License
bg