By Simon Leufstedt on January 12th, 2009
Thanks to Customize.org, one of the most prominent and well-established desktop customization sites on the web, and their Gaia project you can raise awareness for climate change with beautiful styles and themes for your computer desktop, iPhone, music player and instant-messaging program.
I am myself using the visual theme for XP and I must really say that this desktop theme is really beautiful, especially the Gaia icons. If you want you can also get the Gaia theme for the instant-message client Miranda and for the music player Foobar. And you can even enjoy the Gaia theme on your iPhone.
“Climate change and the conservation of our planet is one of the most impartant issues facing us today. Inspired by Live:Earth, a group of Customize.org members tried to find a way of contributing their own part. But how could a website about desktop customization help to combat global warming?
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By Simon Leufstedt on August 8th, 2008
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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By Simon Leufstedt on 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
