Local Cooling: Tuning Your Computer to Save Energy
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 12. 1.06
Its a whole new category: ecosoftware. Last week Greenprint and now Local Cooling, a free Windows program that "fights global warming from your desktop." Sort of. What it really does is fairly straightforward- It reads the device manager to find out what is in your computer and calculates the wattage you are consuming (but does not actually measure it) then tweaks the settings of your power options- monitor, disk and shut-down, and gives you a running tab of how many trees you have saved by shutting down rather than leaving things on. It does not seem to do anything that one could not do themselves if they went into power options on the control panel; it does not monitor fans or CPU speed or any other major power user. It actually doesn't seem to monitor anything. It is pretty and easy to configure, and we like seeing that we saved .023 trees today, but is also taking up 20,000K of memory. Cute idea, but call me back when you can actually do something that I can't do by adjusting settings in the control panel or simply shutting down my computer when I am done with it. ::Local Cooling
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I guess the point is to make it very easy for newbie, put everything in the same place AND show the energy saved as a result.
Probably not very helpful to half-geeks and up, but I can see it being a good educational tool for the majority of the computer-owning population.
Does anyone know how to monitor wattage on a laptop/pc? I am apparently somewhere around a quarter-geek.
It depends on your computer, operating system, and if you are running your computer with a heavy work load (running a cd burning program, MATLAB, etc)
If I remember correctly laptops do around 75-150 watts. nSo around two light bulbs.
I have installed the program.. and i agree with you that is more for newbies that doesnt know how to control the energy settings in control panel.
BUT.. what it is really cool. is that you can configure your settings in an easy way, depending of what you are doing in your PC at the moment.. and you have low,middle,high or custom saving modes. Besides it makes a bip noise when the monitor is going to turn off... or other things. (so it adds some functions)
I will keep it installed.. and obiusly recomend it to all newbies I know.. cause that the purpose of the program. To save energy, stop Global Warming by LOCAL COOLINg... so its good to spread the program.
Be careful installing this program it can cause problems and when you go to uninstall it, it takes your startup programs with it.