Local Cooling: Tuning Your Computer to Save Energy

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