Greening thru your computer!

Not everyone can afford to install solar panels or get a wind mill, but there is one place you can go green without spending an arm and a leg or radically changing your lifestyle: your computer. Chances are you spend the majority of your day sitting in front of the keyboard, and a few small changes can go a long way toward reducing its negative impact on the environment. As an added bonus, doing your part for the environment will save you money, too. There are a few simple ways you can go green with your computer. Obviously, computers require electricity to run, so shutting down, sleeping, or hibernating your computer when you're not using it conserves energy. Every modern operating system has its own settings for conserving power, so the first thing you should do—if you haven't already—is open the power settings of your computer and set them for optimal energy use. Set your computer to put your monitor to sleep, spin down your hard drives, and put your computer to sleep when you're not using it. Even better, since your computer uses less power when hibernating than when sleeping, set up your computer to hibernate rather than just go to sleep. One of the biggest turn-offs (no pun intended) about shutting down or sleeping your computer is that you miss out on some of the finer things your computer provides even when you're away. For example, if you're downloading a large file, you may want the download to continue even when you're away. If a download is what you're waiting for, many peer-to-peer clients, like the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, can shutdown your computer when a download completes so you can get your file and save energy, too.

Save Paper when Printing

When it comes to the environment, one of the first places most offices can improve is the giant pile of discarded paper by the network printer. Aside from obvious things you can do on your own—like printing duplex, printing to PDF, previewing before printing, and not printing hundreds of copies of an email forward to plaster around the office—there are a few other tools you can use to minimize wasting paper and ink when printing. To save ink and paper when you're printing from your browser, tweak the layout of a page and remove elements—like ads and images—that you don't need on the printed page. If you're regularly sending documents back and forth to other people or businesses, you can also save a few trees and save a little time in the process with a couple of office hacks. For example, rather than going through the age-old print, sign, and fax dance handed down through the generations by our forefathers, try creating a scanned signature / digital signature and then sending scanned PDFs rather than faxes. It's quicker and it saves on resources and costs.

Turn Off Peripherals to Kill the power suckers

Now that you've put good energy practices into use on your PC, it's time to move onto the power-hungry peripherals you've got plugged into it. Whenever possible, you want to turn off any peripheral when you're not using it—like your printer or monitor. Likewise, you should be aware of any gear in your computing setup that draws standby power even when you've turned off the device in question.