Go Green. How to save power in Windows

When I'm working on my Desktop, I sometimes need to take a break. If it's a short break, I'm not inclined to shutting down my PC, as going through the boot up process again is annoying. But very often, what I thought would be a short break ends up becoming a long one. I get stuck in a meeting, or I'm simply chatting with friends and forget that my PC is on.

When I come back to my PC after a long break and see it on, I feel guilty. And if the fan is buzzing away, I also wonder whether my system is overheating.

I discovered that Windows has several options to deal with this situation. Under Windows Power Options, you can select different settings for your PC, to take care of any of these situations.

There are 4 power options you can use.

In Windows XP Pro, you can access these options by going through :

Start - Control Panel - Power Options - Power Schemes

You get the following screen.





1. Turn Off Monitor
Under this option, if your PC is going to be idle for a short while, you can choose to shut down only your monitor .Just select the options from the drop down box. You can select the number of minutes the system should be in idle mode before the monitor shuts off.

To restart the PC , simply press any key or move the mouse. The monitor immediately comes on to whatever was the last screen you were using.

Any files that were open will be retained and even unsaved files will continue to remain on the screen.


2. System Stand By
Under this system both the monitor and the system will go into stand by. The monitor will shut down and the system will also go into a low power saving mode. Any open files remain intact, whether they were saved or not.

You can restart by simply pressing any key or moving the mouse.


3. System Hibernate
This is a still more elaborate system for shutting off power. The sytem goes into a still lower power saving mode. The difference between stand by and hibernate, as far as I could understand, was that in stand by, all open files are stored in RAM and in hibernate, files are stored in a separate hiberfil.sys file in the hard disk. When I set my PC to hibernate, all files which were open on my system, whether they were saved or not, reappeared. So I presume that even unsaved files are not lsot when the system goes into hibernate. However, I am not very sure about this.

In hibernate, you need to restart the PC by putting it on and it will open up into the screen you were on, bypassing the booting process. It takes slightly longer for the PC to start up from hibernate than from standby.

4. Turn Off Hard disk
This shuts down the PC completely.So, if you have any unsaved data, that will be lost. The curious thing about this feature is that even when I selected "Turn Off Hard Disk" with the 3 minutes setting, my PC never shut down.

I finally found the reason in a Microsoft support site - apparently, even if you are not using the PC, there are processes running in the background and therefore the Hard disk is not idle. So it may take 15 to 20 minutes before the hard disk actually shuts down. I didn't have the patience to wait that long, so I never verified that. But I will check it over the next few days and will update ths article.

So where do we stand on Power saving ?

What I've done is :

Set "Turn Off monitor' to 5 minutes
Set "System Stand By" to 10 minutes
Set "Syste Hibernate" to 20 minutes
And I've left "Turn Off Hard Disk" to "Mever"

So, now if I'm gone for a short time,either my monitor sill shut down or I'll go into standby. I can restart my PC quickly. If I'm gone for a longer time, I know my system will go into hibernate, which is a good power saving mode to be in.

Incidentally, when you want to shut down your PC, you go to start and select "Turn off computer". You get the following screen.



You can change the Standby mode in this screen to Hibernate bys ressing the Shift key.


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There's one other point I though I'd bring up. Every time I restart from the stand by or hibernate modes, I get the log in screen where I have to re enter my password. This can be irritating when I'm away for very short times. You have the option to bypass this and let the PC open up directly into the Window you were working on. To do this, go to the Power Options Window (mentioned above) and click on Advanced. You'll get the follwoing screen :




Uncheck the "Prompt for password when computer resumes from standby".

In its article on Power Saving, Microsoft says that shutting down the monitor helps reduce CO2 emissions.

So, Go Green and use these options.

Is your PC Slow - 5 Increase virtual memory

I’ve heard this term virtual memory over the years and I had no idea what it meant. I’ve occasionally used the term in situations where people were technically more ignorant than I am because it sounded geeky and esoteric.

While digging around for tips for this article, I finally did enough research to find out what it actually meant.

I have a 256 MB RAM on my Desktop. Apparently, when my RAM is overloaded, the PC uses some of the hard disk space to store files that are being used. The space allocated for this in the hard disk is called virtual memory. This can apparently be increased or decreased. If you increase it, it apparently speeds up your PC performance.

One question I had when I came across this tip was – does that mean that increasing virtual memory gives the same improvement in performance as in increasing my RAM. The answer is – Not really.

Virtual memory sits on a hard disk. It takes a few milliseconds longer for the PC to access virtual memory from a hard disk compared to from a RAM. So, although increasing virtual memory will improve PC speed, increasing your RAM size will probably be faster. I liked this explanation. At least on the face of it, it sounds simple and obvious. It’s a mechanical versus electronic search.

Having said that, its still worth increasing virtual memory. This is how you do it.

Click on Start – Control Panel – System – Advanced – Performance – Advanced

Under virtual memory click on Change. You’ll get the following screen.

First select the drive where you want to increase the virtual memory. In most cases, I’m told, it’s the C drive. I didn’t really understand why, but I presume its because the Windows OS is installed there.

Next, select “Custom size” and in the boxes for Inital
size and Maximum size enter the value for your virtual mamory.

This value should be around 1.5 to 2 times the value of your RAM. My RAM is 256 MB and so I entered 500 in both the boxes. Its also recommended that you enter the same value in both the boxes.Again, I didn’t really understand the explanation but it has something to do with the fact that if there are different values for initial and maximum, the PC may switch from one to another and the settings might change. At least that’s what the explanation sounded like to me.

Now click on Set and OK. You’ll be prompted to restart the PC for the settings to become active.

Is your PC Slow - 4 A faster way to open folders

This has been an irritant for me for a long time. Very often, when I click on My Computer, I see this little dingaling icon swinging back and forth before the folder actually opens.

This tip ia a bit of a gem to increase folder opening speed.

Go to My Computer – Tools – Folder Options – View

Uncheck “Automatically search for network folders and printers”

You can also go through some of the other optiosn and decide whether you want to uncheck them. Then click on “Apply to All Folders”.The screen looks like this :

Windows apparently automatically searches for network files and printers every time you open Windows Explorer and this is what causes the delay.

How to open browser links to a new Window

When I’m browsing the net, using either IE or Mozilla, I, like many other people, I guess, often lose track of where I started from. The Back button saves me most of the time. Recently I discovered a simple rule that helps me to control whether I want a link to open in a new page or not.

In Internet Explorer, hold the Shift key down and then click on a link. It will open the link into a new Window. In Mozilla, hold the Ctrl key down and then click the link.

Neat.

Is your PC slow - 3 Move out unused fonts

This was a completely new and surprising one for me. I had no idea that fonts, the number of them, had anything to do with PC speed. I was also surprised to find that my PC might apparently load new fonts depending upon websites I visit. I’m not sure about this, but that is the impression I got from somewhere.

So I’m advised to remove unnecessary fonts from my C:\WINDOWS/Fonts folder. My first concern of course was – did this mean that applications like Word would no longer have access to a large list of fonts. Well, yes, that’s what it means. But if you only use your system for basic typing and not for fancy design work, its enough to retain a basic set of fonts as I will explain below.

Anyway, the more fonts you remove from the fonts folder, the more the system resources that get freed up. I’m not sure how all this works and what it means. What I did was, in C:WINDOWS I first created a new folder called Fontbackup. Then I moved most of the fonts out of the C:WINDOWS/Fonts folder to this folder. The only fonts I retained were the entire family of Arial, Courier, Times New Roman, Symbol and WingDings fonts. I was also advised to retail MS Serif and Sans Serif but I couldn’t find these on my system.

Now, when I open Word or Excel, these are the only fonts I see in the Fonts drop down menu. If you want to restore these fonts so that programs like Word can use them, go to Control Panel – Fonts and move the fonts from the Fontsbackup folder to this folder.

Is your PC slow - 2 Adjust Visual Effects

This is a simple but surprisingly effective method of speeding up the PC. In my PC it made an immediate and noticeable difference to the speed at which files and folders opened.

Click Start – Control Panel – System – Advanced – Performance – Settings

You’ll come to the following screen :

Under Visual Effects select “Adjust for Best Performance”. All features in the screen will get unchecked automatically. If you’re particular about having some of the visual effects enabled, you can select Custom and check whichever features you want.

Is your PC slow - 1 Modify startup programs

My Home Desktop with a XP pro behaves inconsistently. On some days the PC is fast. When I click on files and folders, they open up instantaneously. On other days the PC is slow. It puzzles me. This happens even when I haven’t made any changes in my settings or added any new software. When its slow – it can be frustrating. When I click on My Computer, it takes a long time to open and I have to watch an icon which swings back and forth like a upside down pendulum. When I click on menu options, the menu highlight bar hangs for a while and then races down to whatever I’m trying to select. Files and folders take a long time to open and sometimes I’m left wondering whether the PC is hanging.

Its irritating.

So I decided to check out the multitude of tweaks available to speed up my PC. I tried out a few and my PC is definitely faster.

Here they are :

Disable unnecessary programs during startup

When your PC starts up, several applications, by default, also get activated. Many of them are unnecessary and slow down the boot up process. You can disable unnecessary programs. To do this click on Start – Run. Type msconfig and click ok. You’ll get a screen which says System Configuration Utility.

When you click on the startup and services tabs you’ll see a list of programs similar to the following

To remove unnecessary programs, uncheck them.

How do you know which programs are unnecessary ?

One way to do this is to uncheck programs and restart your PC. If there is a problem and it happens to be an essential program, your PC may not reboot. In that case, start in safe mode,(Tap on the F8 key for most PCs when your PC is starting. You’ll get a screen where you can start the PC in safe mode) and recheck the program.

The following is a lsit of programs that can be safely removed from the Startup and Services menu .

Fast User Switching
Indexing Service (Slows the hard drive down)
Messenger
Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager
Remote Procedure Call Locater
Remote Registry
Routing & Remote Access
Server
SSDP Discovery Service

TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
Universal Plug and Play Device Host
Upload Manager
Workstation

For one of the most comprehensive lists of startup programs, classified into essential, non essential, dangerous, user defined etc, check out the following site.

http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php?filter=&letter=