Leaving PCs on overnight costs companies $2.8B a year

[BAMAPHIN 22]

Even during an economic meltdown, when companies are scrambling to cut costs, businesses are wasting billions of dollars by leaving their PCs on at night.

U.S. organizations squander $2.8 billion a year to power unused machines, emitting about 20 million tons of carbon dioxide — roughly the equivalent of 4 million cars — according to a report to be released Wednesday.

About half of 108 million office PCs in the USA are not properly shut down at night, says the 2009 PC Energy Report, produced by 1E, an energy-management software company, and the non-profit Alliance to Save Energy. The report analyzed workplace PC power consumption in the USA, United Kingdom and Germany.

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[JCane]

True story. I work in IT for the County of Greenville in Upstate South Carolina. You can imagine how many PC's we have as a COUNTY. We leave everyone on all night long. It's County policy. We push out updates around 3:00AM so any PC not turned on doesn't get the updates until they're turned on. When the updates begin the automatic install, our customer support center gets flooded with people complaining, "My computer is slow this morning. What's wrong? I can't work like this. Waaaaaaa. I want my Mommy."

I wish we would turn off all computers overnight. We're already scaling back budgets and in this economy, even I'm fearful of being cut out due to budget cuts. There's no telling how much the County would save by doing this and forcing County employees to just deal with it.

Times are tough.

[LouPhinFan]

Business should just tell their employees to leave their computers on 1 night a week, say on Thursday nights (that's the night Microsoft pushes out most of their updates) and have them off the rest of the nights. They could always send out an email telling everyone to leave their computers on for special reasons if need be, like when MS pushes out critical updates which can happen any night since they go out immediately.

[JCane]

They could always send out an email telling everyone to leave their computers on for special reasons if need be, like when MS pushes out critical updates which can happen any night since they go out immediately.

I can only laugh at this lol.

And I tell you why, we send out emails ALL THE TIME to the entire County regarding various things. For instance, our help desk will receive a call from Property Management who needs a County-wide email sent about floor waxing or something and Property Management needs to make County employees aware of the upcoming floor waxing and what the employees need to do in the office to help the custodians out so that they are in and out without too much of a hassle.

We send the email, employees see it, don't read it, then delete it. Then we have Auditors calling Property Management asking why no one called them and told them about this, then Property Management is calling back to us asking if we sent the email and it's just ridiculous the things we have to deal with over emails lol. That's why I laugh.

We've sent out emails regarding County policy about restarting PC's and still we get calls about an employee's computer being slow and they can't understand why...

"When was the last time you restarted?"

"This morning."

"What about before that?"

"Last month."

"Well there you go. County policy states you need to restart at the end of every shift. We sent an email about it last week as a reminder."

"I didn't see any email."


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I say we shut the down in this poor economy, save the money, and just let people deal with slower PC's for the first hour or so of their day.