Apple recently released their new line of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, which are mainly made from aluminium. They say that they are their greenest latops ever and claims that they are “highly recyclable and even more energy efficient”, and that they are “designed with the environment in mind”.

But really, how green are the new laptops?

Greenpeace, who is running a hard and successful campaign for greener electronics, says that the new laptops are “not quite the breakthrough” they “were hoping for”:

“A check of the full specs revealed the MacBook Pro, MacBook and MacBook Air – as well as the LED Cinema Display will now have internal cables free of PVC and will have internal components containing no BFRs. Not quite the breakthrough we were hoping for. These new MacBooks are currently on a similar level of toxics reduction to the Sony Viao laptop series on PVC, and the Lenovo Think Vision in monitors. The BFR free internal components represent an improvement from the bar set by the Vaio line.”

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Edison is a new and free energy-saving PC software from the developers at Verdiem. The software makes it a lot easier for you to control your computers power saving features helping you save electricity and money.

Edison doesn’t shut down your computer completely; it just puts it in a “suspend mode” which uses much less energy than if the computer would be running normally. You can decide if you want to schedule Edison to shut down the computer screen and hard drive before going into the suspend mode. The software also displays how much electricity, CO2 emissions, and money you have saved.

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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

Yesterday I talked about how you can fight global warming by buying a laptop due to the fact that they generally use less energy than an ordinary desktop computer.

But it doesn’t really matter if you use a laptop or a desktop computer if you don’t activate the computers power saving settings. And don’t think for a second that your computers screen saver saves energy. Unless the screen or backlight on a laptop or desktop screen actually turns off, a screen saver uses as much power as word processing.

So the best way to save energy is to activate your computers power saving features. Activate your computers sleep mode so that your computer goes to “sleep” while you are (afk) away from keyboard. But don’t worry! Activating the sleep mode doesn’t mean that the computer shuts itself off while you’re not around. All the work and things you were doing before will still be there when you return.

You can also choose to switch off your monitor or spin down the hard drives after a certain amount of time away from your computer. Your power settings also allow you to completely shutdown your computer if you haven’t used it for a while.

But doing all this can be tricky if you aren’t an experienced computer user. So the easiest way is to use a program called LocalCooling. It’s a neat program where it’s only downsides are that it only works on Windows computers.

LocalCooling let’s you easily decide what kind of power saving mode you want to use on your computer and it shows you how much energy your computer uses. The best part is that it shows how many trees, gallons of oil or electricity you have saved when having these power saving settings on. It’s really neat!

If you want you are welcome to join Green-Blogs very own LocalCooling group. This is how you do:

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Zonbu is a small, small like the mac mini, personal computer. But what’s special about the Zonbu is not that it’s so small, it’s that it’s the first zero-emission personal computer.

Zonbu runs on a linux platform with a 1.2 gigahertz processor, 512 meg of RAM and a 4 gigabyte flash card. That’s plenty to satisfy the majority of ordinary computer users.

This small environmental friendly computer consumes six times less power than a standard (energy wasting) light bulb. Did I mention the price tag for this beauty? Zonbu only costs $250 dollars.

But nothing is perfect in the real world. In order to get more storage space you need to subscribe to the Zonbox service. Zonbox will provide you with software and firmware updates and up to 100 gigs of storage space. It will even offset your Zonbu usage. Zonbox costs $12.95. Keep in mind that if you are currently using an older computer you can actually save those money off your utility bill when you have purchased Zonbu (older computers uses more energy).

Related articles about the Zonbu:
- Some Zonbu PCs Shipping with Double Flash Capacity
- My first two weeks with the Zonbu
- 22 Things to Know About the $99 Zonbu Linux PC