Green Home Computing

The book I read to research this post was Green Home Computing for Dummies by Woody Leonhard et al which is an excellent book which I bought from Amazon. I'll tell you a story I worked at a garage as a trainee motor mechanic in about 1988 & they bought a computer I think in 1985 & used it for stock taking & funnily enough when they were bought out in 2010 they were still using the same computer for stock taking. I dread to think what radiation the computer was producing but to them it made sense. The bosses wife who used it didn't have to retrain & you could argue that had they upgraded every 2 years like most companies do nowadays think of all the resources that would have been used. That's the thing with green computing a lot of it's choice although I'm not suggesting you should use something that belts out loads of radiation, but whether you should use an old item that maybe uses more electric or upgrade to something that has used a load of resources in its manufacture is choice. Nobody can be sure which is less harmful to the environment. You can do things like use the power management features in windows & turn off peripherals when not in use. With the advent of cloud computing we should see less companies & homes upgrading their computers every 2 years which however you look at it is wasteful. Another development is a lot of homes use a home server which might sound wasteful but you can recycle a lot of the components used in it & it centralises your data so you can use older computers as workstations. Even games are going over to cloud computing and eventually an old computer will be able to play the latest games in high definition as the processing will be done at the other end but I think that will be in the reasonably near future.