Upgrading your computer
Everyone likes upgrading their PC because it means they can now use a faster computer with more features, but it’s also a great way to save money on electricity costs while going green. As technology advances so does the techniques used to save power. Anyone who had a laptop a decade ago remembers the problems with heat, size and horrible battery life. Nowadays these problems are barely a concern with laptop battery life being at minimal 3-4 hours, but generally can go up to 10 hours or beyond. New breakthroughs in battery technology have helped, but it has been the tech industry as a whole that has increased battery life. As new CPUs and Memory chips are being created, one of the main goals is to make sure the next generation runs faster, but also uses less electricity and generates less heat. This is done through new techniques created to create smaller transistors, which allows more to be placed on a single chip, and less electricity to be needed to use them. This combined with new features that keep energy consumption in mind have allows computers to lower their speeds when idle to decrease and consume less power, but can increase speed again when needed.
Installing a new Hard drive
Most components in computers don’t actually move, this is with a couple general exceptions; fans and hard drives. Hard drives contain spinning plates inside them and these plates spin generally at speeds of 7200 RPMs, new ecofriendly drives have been created to lower the speed of the hard drive when its sitting idle and depending on how you are using the hard drive can even park it to save even more electricity and is often used as a feature in sleep/hibernate mode on PCs. The introduction of SSDs has lowered power even more while increase speeds considerably. Working similar to a flash drive, an SSD has no moving parts and can sit idle for long periods of time using almost no electricity. These breakthroughs in SSDs have been one of the major reasons Apple has been able to offer such long battery life for their iPad and MacBook Air products, which can sleep for up to a month and still have a charge.
Virtualizing your IT Center
Virtualization is generally used in data centers and has been able to cut down on wasteful energy consumption by consolidating the amount of physical servers needed to run the data center. A traditional datacenter has each server assigned to a specific task, whether that task only takes 10% of the server power or 80%, each server only is concerned with that one task. By virtualizing each server you can run multiple virtual servers on one physical, allowing you to put more virtual servers on underutilized physical servers. Then if one server needs more resources it can move it to another server that has more resources or can start up an idle server and move it back when the task is done. These new features have allowed major data centers to cut costs on equipment and on electricity needed to run the center.
