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?

The overwhelming majority of scientists agree that human activity is responsible for changing the climate. Although a majoritiy of co2 emission is produced by industry, private households add significantly to the problem by using multiple fridges, televisions, cars and – last but not least – personal computers. So what can we do to support the movement? With this suite, we want to raise awareness for the issue and remind users of nature and its beauty. To remind you of shutting down your computer at night if you don´t need it. To turn your gadgets off instead of having them on standby. With this voluminous release of skins for Windows XP and OS X we want to bring attention to the topic in the skinning community and hope to make you think more about the issue and your own ecological footprint.

We hope this project will reach a lot of people.”

Just be sure to backup any data before installing the themes, especially before installing the Ux Theme Multi Patcher (which is needed to use the Gaia theme) on your computer. You can never be too careful!

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.

It depends from computer to computer how much energy and money you will save with a tool like this. Verdiem says the average savings is 410 kilowatt hours a year which is equal to $36.50 in savings.

“Recent studies predict PC ownership will quadruple to 4 billion and double emissions by 2020 , so implementing PC energy management solutions at home and in the workplace is a vital component of climate protection,” said Lorie Wigle, President of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. “Tools like Edison can help consumers control and monitor their PC’s energy intake and make a real difference in the way they manage the power consumption of the technology they use.”

Edison requires Windows XP or Windows Vista and can be downloaded for free here.

Another similar program to check out is LocalCooling which has been around for much longer and has the similar features (it can also shut down your computer).

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