Laptop for college

[Kurt_]

Just throwing this out there

Keeping your desktop on for an hour uses enough energy to light up a lightbulb for an entire day.

Don't be wasting our energy because you're too impatient to wait two minutes to boot up. Go grab a snack or unload your books after you turn on your PC.


COMPLETELY OFF TOPIC WARNING

Y'all are already in this big economic crisis because you spent so much money and then one day, mysteriously, y'all are like "Oh whoops it looks like we're billions of dollars in debt. Didn't notice that happening! Must have happened in our sleep!" and you're dragging Canadians and other countries down with you. Canadians are in the clear money-wise, but we're losing jobs at record rates because we depend on you like you depend on us.

My point: At the rate we're using/wasting electricity, and the rate our population is growing, we're not going to last unless we change some things around.

You should watch this.
http://storyofstuff.com/

[Triton]

america could save billions (or tens of billions) of dollars a year and reducing pollution by a significant percentage by upgrading to a more efficient digitally controlled power grid. only problem being is it would cost 2 trillion dollars and take the better part of a decade to do the switch. its not all the consumers fault

[Kurt_]

Population of the USA: 303,824,640 as of July 2008.
Assuming one computer per person (children these days have computers, and even if they don't, many people have more than one they leave on all the time), that's 303,824,640 computers. Assuming half leave them on overnight, that's 151,912,320 computers on for 8 excess hours, and that's being generous.

Now, one hour of a computer uses the same energy as one day of a 60W lightbulb. That means...

Screw it, go here:

http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html

60kWh/month * 151,912,320 computers = 12,477,664,500 kWh/month.

That's 12.5 GIGAWATT Hours per MONTH.

That's 149.7 GigaWatt Hours per year.

That's enough power to power 112.3 MILLION households continuously.

And all that could be saved if you'd just turn your computers off at night. Tell me that isn't wasteful.

[gamecube6]

Look! A mathematics lesson!

You're applying for engineering in college, aren't you, Kurt_? It shows

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I turn off my computer at night... Usually...

[Black Six]

Interesting bicostp, I speced out a Vostro 1510 for under $1000 and it seemed better than the MacBook AND had a 256MB graphics card.

[Kurt_]

I'm already in Engineering at UNIVERSITY. Over here college is for dummies. It's your "Community College" I think.

[vskid]

Now, one hour of a computer uses the same energy as one day of a 60W lightbulb.

Don't know where you heard that. A 60w lightbulb uses 1440wh a day, only an awesome desktop with 4 30" LCDs would draw that much in an hour. It could have meant an 8 hour day, which gives you a much more reasonable 480wh.

Also, just have your computer go into standby or hibernate after half an hour. You can even manually put it in a low power mode if you know you won't be back for a while (going to bed/school/work).

[Kurt_]

Or just get it to turn off.

[vskid]

Or just get it to turn off.

Hibernating gives you all lack of power usage, but with a fast start up time (10-15 seconds in my experience). Doesn't help if the system has become unstable from being on a long time, but it'll get you to where you left everything.

[Twilight Wolf]

I usually put my laptop into sleep mode if I'm not using it at the moment but plan on coming back to it. If I don't come back to it... it's in sleep mode. Easy to bring it back up, but not using a bunch of power like being on.

[Triton]

Population of the USA: 303,824,640 as of July 2008.
Assuming one computer per person (children these days have computers, and even if they don't, many people have more than one they leave on all the time), that's 303,824,640 computers. Assuming half leave them on overnight, that's 151,912,320 computers on for 8 excess hours, and that's being generous.

Now, one hour of a computer uses the same energy as one day of a 60W lightbulb. That means...

Screw it, go here:

http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html

60kWh/month * 151,912,320 computers = 12,477,664,500 kWh/month.

That's 12.5 GIGAWATT Hours per MONTH.

That's 149.7 GigaWatt Hours per year.

That's enough power to power 112.3 MILLION households continuously.

And all that could be saved if you'd just turn your computers off at night. Tell me that isn't wasteful.

sure its wasteful but now calculate how much energy would be saved if we switched to digital power grid and efficiency went up 10-25% thats 10%-25% less power consumed (via improved efficiency of the delivery system) for EVERY HOUSEHOLD IN THE USA. id be willing to bet the numbers are similar

For example, if smart grid technologies made the United States grid 5% more efficient, it would equate to eliminating the fuel and greenhouse gas emissions from 53 million cars.[1]

[Jongamer]

Or just get it to turn off.

Hibernating gives you all lack of power usage, but with a fast start up time (10-15 seconds in my experience). Doesn't help if the system has become unstable from being on a long time, but it'll get you to where you left everything.

Takes a load of HDD space though.

[Black Six]

How about we stay on topic? If you want to discuss how much electricity we're wasting, go make another thread. Or maybe we should have Ben shut down the forums because the server they're on has to run 24 hours a day and the forum software probably increases the power draw. Or we could shut down the whole Internet! I'm a genius! </sarcasm>

Anyway, stay on topic people.

[gamecube6]

I'm already in Engineering at UNIVERSITY. Over here college is for dummies. It's your "Community College" I think.

Yeow, my bad. (Although you don't see many engineers come out of community colleges nowadays, so university was pretty much implied)