Always-on PCs waste $500 million a year
 

A 1E PC Energy Report says that over 31 million US-based office PCs are left switched on all night, wasting over half a billion dollars a year in energy costs.

The report says that there are 104 million office PCs in the US, and that a 10,000 PC business could save over $165,00 a year in energy costs and 1,381 tonnes of CO2 emissions simply by switching them off overnight. Turning off every work computer in the USA every night would save as much CO2 emissions as taking every car in the state of Maryland off the road.

http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9288

This bugs me, especially considering the wasted energy and environmental impact. However, we ask that people here at the office do leave their machines on at night so we can push out updates and perform remote maintenence, etc. Hrm.

we push updates at 9am when they first boot their machine:)

Work hours in U.S. sucks :D

My entire University does this simply because they can't get every single PC to "boot up" on command, or one boots up in the middle of an update and bad things happened. At least was the story I picked up...

Either way, it's over a few thousand computers if you consider 1) All the computer classrooms with 35-65 comps per room, several per floor, per building, 2) General student computing labs per department with ~100 PCs in most, 3) last but not least Faculty and classroom machines. And this almost gets doubled again because we have two separate campuses here.

And exlucding the Macs, all of these are using Pentium 4s or Pentium Ds.

You got that right, bub. Though we are owned by Publicis (France) now so the vacation time got better ;-)

Didn't Intel have something in their pocket for this problem?