My “green” suggestion is to turn off your computer at night. It is a myth that this will harm your computer, which started in the 1960s when computer terminals (which look much like today’s PCs) were first connected to computer mainframes. If you turned off the computer terminal, and then turned it back on, IBM mainframe computers would not recognize it unless the mainframe was restarted, which took 45 minutes and stopped all computer work in the company. Since people had little understanding of computers then, this was too difficult to explain, so they were just told it would harm the computer if you turned off the computer terminal. Today’s personal computer hardware isn’t much different from your television, and you don’t leave your TV on 24 hours a day, do you?
If you currently don’t turn off your computer at night because you don’t want to lose track of what you were doing on your computer, there is a way to save what you’re doing and still turn off your PC. On a Windows XP PC, after you click the Start button and click Turn Off Computer, you have four choices:
Hibernate: this saves where you are in all of your open applications. When you turn on your PC, all of your applications will be restored to where you were before.
Stand By: this also saves where you are in all your open applications, is faster than Hibernate, but does not save as much electricity.
Turn Off: this saves as much electricity as Hibernate, but quits all of your applications, so you need to save what you were doing first.
Restart: this does not turn off your computer; it restarts it, and is mainly used when installing applications or when your computer is acting strangely.
Joe Steffen
Oak Park