Came across this article on The NY Times showing that while home electronics are turned off, they consumed 40% more electricity than when it is on. A testing shows that when the DVD player was using 27 Watts in idle mode, but it used up 47 Watts when shutting down. This is a great amount of wastage! So next time, maybe you want to consider to put your electronic devices into standby mode rather than completely shut it off.

The journalist also mentioned a free useful software to help on power saving. It is Co2 Saver. It gives users a control panel to specify the exact time to turn off monitors and disk drives and properly put the machine to sleep compare to Windows XP and Vista Sleep method.

From what my I know, the Windows operating system hibernate mode not only waste more power than normal, but also use up quite a lot of hard disk space as a temporary storage for all the setting and data before shutting down.

So, start from today, we need to try to be more energy conservation minded. This not only for the sakes of our earth also saves our money!