Green Computing

Green computing is popular now a day, going green is very much important to make yourself, your surroundings and the planet healthy. We got lot of people around the world using computers, but the cause for green computing is simple. First we have to understand what is Green Computing? Green computing can be defined as environmentally responsible use of your computers and their resources. In this part, we can discuss about the cause for green computing and some of the ways to make it happen.

Cause for Green Computing

Uses lot of electricity

Most of the natural resources are being used to get the electricity, that all have some impacts on the environment.

Creates lots of toxic waste

Most of us are updating our computers, throwing our outdated computer resources, peripherals, and other hardware devices etc, these are the hazardous toxic waste we are producing that really damaging the environment now a days.

Impact of Electricity to the Environment

The Electric power produces more pollution to the environment. They are Air pollution, Water Pollution and Land pollution. Fossil fuel power plants release air pollution and require lot of water. Nuclear power plants release lot of radio active energy and hazardous waste. Even renewable energy sources affecting water and wild life and even hurting the food chain too.
Air pollution impacts on Climate change, Acid rain, Ozone, Air toxics
Water pollution impacts on Consumption of water resources, Polluting water bodies
Land pollution impacts on Degrade and devalue the land, impacting ecosystem and aesthetics.

Impact of Toxic waste to the Environment

The computer crowding our landfills contains lead, mercury, cadmium, beryllium and traces of many other hazardous materials.
Incineration, this releases heavy metals like lead, mercury and cadmium into air and ashes. Even recycling the electronics can harm the workers and the environment surrounding them.

So, we are putting a clean stain on the environment. We cant stop using computers and we cant stop using electricity. Those are more important parts of our lives and economy. But we can do some thing to make the environment healthy. These are the some of the main causes for the Green Computing.

Ways for Green Computing

Reduce Power Consumption

The use of electricity in our computer is very essential. We had to make use of the computers efficiently to save the power and cost. By managing our computer resources effectively, we can save the power. Here the some of the techniques to power saving

By using Power Option in your Control Panel, you can save the power

Turn off monitor

This mode allows you to turn off the monitor, if the system is idle for more minutes. Use LED, LCD monitors instead of CRTs it will reduce a lot of power. By turning off your monitor you can save half the energy that is used by the system. So turn off the monitor when download in progress or when it is in idle for some minutes. You can automate through this option. Turn of monitor, after it is idle for 10 minutes, thats what we can recommend.

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Turn off hard disks

This mode allows you to turn off hard disks if it is idle. You can automate this and what we recommend is to set the turn off time to 30 minutes or to some other value depending upon your usage.

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System Standby / Sleep

This mode allows you to save a lot of power, Automate this option to save power. It will turn off the monitor, hard drive, sound card, graphics and video cards and almost everything. The current state of your system will be saved in RAM. If you want to use it again, you can move the mouse or touch the keyboard to make everything turn on. Draw back in this option is if there is a power outage then the unsaved things will be gone. We can recommend this option over Hibernate option for both desktops and laptops. Automate this by after it is idle for 15 minutes.

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Hibernate

This mode allows you to shut everything down. But the difference from sleep/ standby mode is how it is storing your information in the RAM; it will write all the information to the hard drive and shuts everything down. This allows you to shut down memory as in standby by you cannot. But memory doesnt use much power. So, we recommend this option for only laptop users if it is running on battery. You can automate this idle after 30 minutes.

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In upcoming parts we will discuss about some other methods of power savings in your computer and to forward us to go green with our computers

Reduce Toxic Waste

Reducing e-waste is very much important. By practicing Green Computing, we had to know how to properly dispose the computers and other hardware devices. First check the manufacturer information that they may take back your old product back. In now a day many concerns take the old gadgets from you to get them recycled. Depending on where you live you can take the old parts of your computers to near by retailers, electronics repair shop they can dispose your products easily to recycler.

Cloud Computing

Use latest technologies that avoid to setting up your own hardware/software infrastructure, with cloud computing you can do that. HaaS means hardware as a service allows you to use hardware from remote location through visualization.

In this part, we discuss about Green computing, causes and ways for green computing. And polluting the environment is a very big issue. To make yourself and your surroundings healthy keep the environment cleaner as computer users we let start with Green Computing. Participate by sharing your ideas about Green Computing in this and Upcoming Green Computing articles, and make this Green Computing happen everywhere.