Fight global warming with local cooling

An interesting take on environmentally friendly computing hit my desktop today, the LocalCooling.com project from Uniblue Systems, better known for the Windows Task Manager on steroids, WinTasks Pro. LocalCooling.com aims to build a community of people all using the Local Cooling software utility to control the power consumption of their PCs. The idea being that if enough people join in, and the target is a perhaps rather optimistic 100 million, the global computing carbon footprint could be reduced dramatically.

Here’s how the non-commercial project works. You download a small application that automatically optimises your PC power settings to use a more efficient and effective power save mode via an easy to use interface. OK, so the Windows power settings interface isn’t exactly hard to use but Local Cooling takes things a little further in that a screen shows how much power your computer is using, by way of various components such as the display, storage, CPU and graphics card for example, then a simple slider lets you choose how much power you want to save. Better yet, it then shows you exactly how much power you have saved since installing it. An advanced tab lets you fully customise exactly how long before hard drives spin down or the PC shuts down, you can even specify a time before which it should never shut down and instruct it never to if a particular application is running. So, quite a move forward from the basic Windows power control after all.