After reading this post on Treehugger about these ads, I decided I needed to apply this to my own computing habits. I have a PC in the house which does nothing but backup my other machines. Though this backup job runs at 11 PM every night, I used to keep the PC running 24 hours a day.

Obviously, this is wasteful, so I poked around in the PC’s bios and found a watchdog option which will boot the computer by a clock setting. Now the PC boots right before 11 PM, does its backup chores, and shuts itself down after half an hour. Numerous trees saved, untold pounds of carbon dioxide saved from the atmosphere, and a quieter house, too! Continue reading →