Make Your Company Greener By Employing Power Management Software

Ineffective PC power management is one of the main factors of power wasting in offices today. Most of PCs are usually not used throughout all day, but they consume electric energy to keep working. Around a half of all office computers are not powered off at night by users. Almost every company loose from thousands to millions of dollars every year because of energy wasting. Computer software and hardware vendors realized this problem time ago and created technologies that should enable companies to reduce electric energy wasting and, as the result, save money and reduce global CO2 emission.

How you can begin saving energy costs? The simplest way to start is to turn on power control settings of hardware and operation system. Hardware vendors usually make computer power management settings available for configuration through BIOS setup. Options can be different depending on a hardware type and vendor. Newest versions of operation systems come with advanced power management options with various settings. As an example, in Windows it's possible to have multiple power management profiles and switch between them easily. Every profile can be configured to specify power management options for a display, a processor and also other PC components. Utilizing these settings computer can be configured to turn off a monitor and go to a sleep mode after defined inactivity time.

For a single PC it's very effective to use power management plan in order to switch to a sleep mode automatically when computer isn't used. In most of cases, it's the one action required for home users to benefit from power saving. But this method isn't very effective on practice in corporate environment because it's tough to apply required power management profiles to all PCs. Manual work is involved to go to all desktops and apply power plans or it requires creating scripts or using software to apply power settings over a network. In any case, it needs time and cost investment, at the end. As it was pointed out earlier, it will be wrong to expect 100% return of investment in this case. On practice many people will try to revert applied changes because, for example, they don't like that their PC goes to sleep in 10 minutes when they are on a call, or they don't like that PC starts slowly. Based on industry studies a success rate of using a power management plan is only about 60% after two months since its applying.

There's another, less restrictive and more successful way to organize power management for companies and organizations. According to research, a large part of power is wasted at night, when users keep their PCs running with no active assignments. Practically a half of users just forget to turn off computer or keep it working to reduce startup time next morning. Network administrators can detect these desktops and turn them off and on remotely. This procedure can be entirely automated using a specialized remote shutdown and wake up software.

Wake-on-LAN technology (also abbreviated as WOL) was implemented by software and hardware vendors in order to allow waking up computers remotely. This technology makes possible to turn on desktops, that are in a sleep mode, by sending them a special packet over a network. It enables network administrators to wake up selected computers in a network, when required, using a software that can send Wake-on-LAN packets. Also network administrators have an access to all corporate computers over a network and it can be used to control computers remotely. Power management tools and utilities usually contain remote shutdown features used by administrators to turn off computers over a network. Advanced power management software include remote shutdown, Wake-on-LAN and other operations to allow administrators managing state of network computers remotely from a central location. This software can also include scheduling options to run wake up and shut down operations automatically at a defined time.

Power management software is very effective for managing large networks and can be used by enterprises, universities and school districts with thousands of workstations in a network. Network administrators can use it to create own power management plans and turn off and on PCs according to timetable. It guarantees that all PCs will be powered off and on when required. In a global prospective it allows companies and organization to cut power bills and grow to be greener.