You can reduce power consumption and achieve significant energy savings when using your PC simply by acquiring a few good habits.

Here are just a few of the tips:

- In order to reduce energy consumption and in particular battery consumption, it is recommended to not change the standard configuration set by the manufacturer. In fact, after a certain period of inactivity, the monitor automatically “goes to sleep”. In this mode, it consumes just 1 to 3 watts of energy.

- The most effective way of reducing consumption when your PC is not in use is to put it in hibernate mode. Rather than shutting down your PC every day, restarting it, then re-opening all your applications, it is much better to “suspend” PC activity, because energy consumption in this mode is roughly 5 watts for a desktop PC and 1 watt for a laptop.

- Radio antennas consume a lot of energy and battery power when they kick into operation. Windows Vista and Windows 7 natively support the ability to disable the laptop antenna when not in use. This ability to disable the antenna for short periods of time helps to prolong battery life.

New Windows PCs normally have the Wi-Fi antenna enabled for best performance, meaning they are not configured for power saving. So it is up to you to use your wireless antenna in a way that maximizes battery life. If you don’t need to browse the Internet or connect, you can switch the Wi-Fi antenna off completely.

- Regulate Windows Search indexing. One of the most interesting changes in Windows 7 & Vista is the ability to index all PC content, from e-mails to documents to images. This is a task that Windows performs in the background or while you are doing something else, but it’s a task that inevitably consumes energy.

For more tips for ‘greening’ your PC, conserving laptop battery power & knowing ways to recycle your PC visit Microsoft.

Watch animation and know more on how Microsoft is working to make a difference to the environment, click here.

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