Monday, November 03, 2008

Green

A guy at work has been working on a green project involving putting PCs into reduced power states. He had a Kill-A-Watt so I borrowed it and brought it home.

My tests were clearly unscientific but I tried to be consistent.

I tested 4 laptops: a ThinkPad T42, a Dell D410, an Asus Eee PC 1000H, and a ThinkPad T61.

I ran each through 4 scenarios. First was a Steady state. XP was booted and "idle" as I wasn't intentionally running anything. I made no attempt to stop background tasks. Next, I started a search of the hard drive for a character string in a file name that would be unlikely to be found. During this I subjectively recorded the Search value and the Peak value. Lastly, I put each system in Standby.

The LCD was powered on and the battery was fully charged in all tests.

The Kill-A-Watt only recorded whole Watts so there is probably an issue with resolution in the Standby readings. It read 1 Watt when nothing was plugged into it.

Nevertheless, there are some pretty interesting results:

Laptop
Steady
Search
Peak
Standby
T42
22
24
31
3
D410
20
28
34
2
1000H
11
13
14
1
T61
37
72
83
3

The Asus Standby effectively read no power draw but that can't be accurate. This is likely an issue with the resolution mentioned earlier.

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