Smart Power strips can be really smart!
 

Here's my brand new Smart Strip that powers my PC junk..
http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...slot/strip.jpg

I've discovered a hidden treasure in this little gadget..
When I step away from my PC for a while, the Windows power-save
setting take the PC down to low power. (Almost asleep).

I've got the sensitivity on the Smart strip set, so it sees the lower power
of the PC and turns off all the other stuff (monitor, speakers etc)..

When I come back and wiggle the mouse, everything quickly comes right back on.. :D

Nice, I'm trying to decide what to do with one that I won. It just arrived. This PC never sleeps at the moment. I need to figure out how to set it up so it stays awake for regular activity, bittorrent transfers and wakes hourly and runs a script sleeping again if nothing starts during the script. It should be possible but I've yet to figure it out. Not a lot on power saving with desktop PC's for linux on google

I've been thinking of retiring this old Dell desktop for a netbook.
90% of the stuff I do on the Dell could be done on a net book.

I've been using a little tablet to check my mail, the weather & headlines, in the mornings.
If nothing much is going on, I just leave the old Dell off a little longer.

I don't like typing into the tablet, it's just too slow and awkward.
So, I think a cool running netbook would be the ticket.
I could leave it on 24-7, and let the power save modes keep it from
going down for the count..
Then, I could walk by, press on the pad and see my house monitor app.. :cool:

I figured this machine would be running 24/7 since it's my development, downloading, browsing, media library, and media center PC.

Right now I have a compile running in a virtual machine XP that is almost maxing 1 of the 4 cores. Another core is at 15% handling the media center which is currently playing a 1080p movie for my wife and daughter on the Tv in the living room. 1 core is at 30% handling everything else and the 4th core is idle.

Since I knew I wanted/needed to do all of this for fun and work I dropped an extra $150 in costs and built as efficient of a "power" machine I could. It's an athlon 900e for the processor and everything else I added was low power usage or very efficient. The end result was a new machine that uses 80 to 100 watts continuous. This replaces 3 old machines that ran 100 watts each and it's a hell of a lot better then all 3 combined.

Interesting note - I've been surplusing old machines on a contracts here. According to the killawatt some of the P4's circa 2005 use 180 watts while idling. I've also found laptops that used 90 watts and had warnings not to place on bare skin due to possible burns. New machines are vastly superior in energy usage.

The major issue is getting sleep set up on here. Two of the old machines would be in standby most of the time so power usage wasn't too insane.

At the moment the printer, and scanner are unplugged. It'll be nice to get powersave working and get the monitor and speakers connected to that smart bar.