Essay on Green Computing
Processors are not the only hardware that helps save energy while your PC is running. Western Digital, a hard drive manufacturer, has a line of hard drives titled “Caviar”. These hard drives come in different sizes depending on your needs. These hard drives only require eight watts of electricity to power it. (PC World) Eight watts is low and typically hard drives are one of the lowest power consuming components, but there is a new technology that blows hard drives out of the water. Solid State drives are a fairly new technology that I feel are going to make hard drives obsolete. Not only do these solid state drives require less power they generate less heat. A solid state drive can spend 90 percent of the time in a low power state compared to the hard drive which spends 10 percent of the time when in sleep mode. (CNET) “Sleep Mode” is a low power mode in windows XP. The performance of solid state drives is out of this world when compared to hard drives. Solid state drives are not as popular as hard drives because it’s a new technology and still quite expensive.
Adding a new monitor to your current computer setup is very easy. All you need to do is unplug the old one and plug in the new one. Once the new one is plugged in it is ready to use. Monitors are another big power drain that can be easily upgraded. CRT monitors, which are the big tube monitors, use around 63% more energy than the thin flat screen