Computers are power hungry monsters, often using between 300W and 500W of power! Given that an energy saving light bulb uses around 15W of power, computers can be responsible for expensive energy bills. I know that when I was a student at university, 6 computer scientists in one house each with at least one computer, led to an expensive electricity bill!

The Aleutia E2 was designed with low energy consumption in mind, needing only 8W of power! That’s just 2% of the power compared to a conventional PC using up to 400W of power! The computer uses solid-state memory cards rather than hard drives for storage, no energy guzzling CD or DVD drives, and uses energy efficient memory and processors. Admittedly the PC runs at 500MHz with 1GB of RAM, but it can run all conventional applications such as Firefox and OpenOffice on Ubuntu Linux.

The Aleutia team have recently released a Windows XP version, as well as a Wifi-enabled one, and an Aleutia E2 model with 32GB of storage as an SSD card. It’s only the size of about 3 CD cases stacked on top of each other too (Only 11.5cm x 11.5cm x 3.5cm). It’s not quite fast enough for YouTube, Google Earth or BBC iPlayer, but it does everything else. Absolutely fine for word processing, email, blogging, etc.

The motivation behind the Aleutia PC’s design was to find a rugged, reliable, low energy and cheap PC that could be used in the developing countries such as Africa. Energy supplies are hard to come by in that neck of the woods, hence the Aleutia PC was designed to be run from a solar panel! The Aleutia E1 was the first generation of Aleutia PC, but the E2 has attracted the attention of eco-technology-loving-folk such as myself. It’s an exciting product that doesn’t cost the earth too!

This article was written by Dan Harrison of EnviroGadget.com and Daily Eco Tips. Dan is enthusiastic about low power computers, green issue, and encouraging people to do their bit for the planet in small easy steps.

Earth Drive 4 Gig drive 34.99 at Costco

Now that almost everyone is using the USB flash drives to transfer and store their files we are facing the same issue that we have with CD’s and floppies - they get thrown out eventually. Our landfills are already overflowing with electronic junk so it’s a great idea that ATP has come up with a fully recyclable USB flash drive, called the EarthDrive. What makes the EarthDrive so special is that it is made from bio-recycled materials and is completely shockproof, waterproof and dustproof. You might freak out when you see their inflated prices (Costco sells the 8 Gig drive for 60.00) but the bite out of your wallet is less painful when you hear that ATP donates a portion of all their proceeds to planting trees all around the world. (hopefully not too near the Arctic circle.)

USB Cell Price: £8.79 (approx. USD 17.49) from usbcell.com
Keep batteries out of the landfill with USB Rechargable Batteries. All you do is pop it into your computer’s USB port, and let the charging begin from power already flowing through your PC.

Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) is the latest in screen technology that is getting ready to become the next big thing in flat-screen technology. It can be manufactured much thinner that the LCD and Plasma ones, because there is no need for the heavy duty backlighting. And the screen produces a clearer, truer image in the process. Plus, it uses a lot less electricity to run so that can be a good thing. The bad thing, very bad perhaps, is that eventually millions of people will toss their old monitors and TVs into the vast heap of toxic electronic waste flood that we already have.

The new web browser Flock’s Eco-Edition offers interesting possibilities in Green Computing.

It is a free browser that focused on helping people connect, share and explore contemporary websites that have a community emphasis. The Flock Eco-Edition browser comes pre-loaded with carefully selected green content from a variety of sources such as Grist, Ecorazzi, Treehugger, PlanetGreen, National Geographic, Sprig, Environmental News Network and many more. They offer daily updated environmental news, interviews, video, and other rich media. If you find something that is particularly useful, interesting or disturbing you can share it with a built in Flock sidebar that connects your friends from Facebook, Flicker, You Tube and other such sites.

The Flock 2.0 Beta version is built on the Firefox 3.0 browser and takes advantage of the various performance and security enhancement improvements offered by Firefox 3.0

In the Eco-Edition - the Flock people state that “Flock believes in providing users who download the Flock Eco-Edition a means to give back by donating 10% of search proceeds to the environmental charity of choice, as deemed by the voting of the community of Flock’s Eco-Edition users at the end of this year. Flock makes money when people search through the browser. So the more you search via Flock Eco-Edition, the more we’re committing to give back.”

Maybe they are just painting one of their “editions” Green so as to persuade people into switching to their browser but the fact they are promoting Green causes and giving some of their money back to environmental causes can’t be a bad thing. Might be worth giving them an investigation.

Cool and free new desktop Widget for Mac and PC from Environmental News Network

Gives you easy access to the latest environmental news from ENN, interesting factoids, and a very cool-green search engine that checks your location (via zip code) for the nearest local green grocers and more. Easy install but you will need the free and easy Yahoo widget engine installed to get it to work (apple version not yet available)

GreenPrint Home Version from PrintGreener.com $35.00 with a 30 day free trial

PrintGreener.com offers software program that can help you significantly reduce your paper usage when printing. The software looks at your document and offers a variety of suggestions on how you might be able to avoid common paper wasting - like printing a page that only has a few lines of text on it. Or a means to easily remove graphics, logos and the like - which also helps to reduce ink use. Treehugger has a review here. Fineprint offers a similar program with many excellent features worth checking out but is a little more costly at 49.95.

However, with just a little more effort most all of these things can be done manually for free, here is a link that offers a comprehensive list of various simple methods people can use to cut down on paper use when you have to print.

You would think that since virtually everyone uses computers these days our paper use would be gradually lessening, sadly this doesn’t seem to be the case. The average office worker prints and copies through some 10,000 pages every year, the average person in the United States uses more than 650 pounds of paper annually. Millions of tons of junk mail every year is immediately thrown away seconds after being removed from our mailboxes. Both consumers and business waste phenomenal amounts of paper that could easily be prevented by taking simple measures such as using GreenPrint or similar measures. Perhaps even better is if more people would forgo printing unless absolutely necessary, then even more paper waste and environmental harm could be prevented.
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Zonbu A great new affordable and green computer planned for September 2007 from Zonbu.com

As more people embrace a green lifestyle, they will also embrance computer makers that put their environmental responsibility in the forefront. Great Green Gadgets has been fortunate to be invited to review a Zonbu beta version of a new addition to this green computing movement.

In case you haven’t heard of the Zonbu before it’s an ultra low-power mini computer. The Zonbu leaves a small footprint on your desk, about the size of a paperback. It has no moving parts, no fan so it is completely quiet, nice when you are using it to play your music files or videos. It uses a 1.2GHz intel-compatible low-power processor chip, has 512 MB of RAM and a 4GB flash drive that holds the Linux Operating System (Gentoo Linux) Currently, you will need your own keyboard, mouse, monitor and a cable to connect with the router for your internet connection. (has Ethernet built-in) It has 6 USB ports and
should work with most USB devices but I have read that there may be problems getting scanners and webcams to work. Here is a link to a Gizmodo article that looks at the device hardware more in depth.

I was struck by the simplicity of it all. I just put in my user name and password and I was good to go. Except it took me a week to find a cable to connect it with a router, but I can’t put that on Zonbu! Finding and using the software was very straight forward, setup for email was easy, all very similar to a Windows XP box. Less computer savvy users might need a little more help getting around - especially if that is Zonbu’s target audience. A simple video tutorial might be useful for each of the major applications and overview of the OS.
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CO₂ Saver a free power saving utility

Depending on how many computers you use, how much you use them, and what ways you use them; your annual computer power usage could be causing thousands of pounds of CO2 to be pumped into the atmosphere. A great article in today’s New York Times, Putting Energy Hogs in the Home on a Strict Low-Power Diet, By LARRY MAGID discusses ways to reduce energy usage in the home and talks about computer power use in depth.

Eventually, many computers should become far more energy efficient but right now many of us can dramatically reduce our energy consumption with just a few simple measures.

The easiest way to save power is to simply turn off your computer when you aren’t using it. But if you need your computer to quickly be available - and you don’t want to wait for slow boot up times then configure your machine to go into a low-power sleep or suspend mode. You will need to tell Windows XP in the power options in the Control Panel to set the amount of time before Windows will turn off the monitor and hard disks or put the system into standby or hibernate mode. If you are using a Mac then just go into the system preferences and choose power options - the rest should be self-explanatory.

If you’d rather a sexier way of configuring your computer’s power usage then check out the new CO2 Saver for Windows XP and Windows Vista. It is a small program that will adjust your power savings for you, it stays on your desktop and tells you how much power and CO2 you have saved by using this program. It seems to be a free program put out by the search engine Snap.com,in part, as a way to promote it’s presence as a search engine.

If you want to read more on this topic, a previous post here, Turn it off! (when you’re done) also discusses this topic in more detail.

Apple’s new MacBook Pro 15″ laptops replace LCD with new mercury-free LED backlit monitor.

Apple begins their transition to using LED (Light-emitting diode) instead of LCD screens. Today most LCD screens are lit with a type of fluorescent bulb (called cold cathode fluorescent backlights) that contains mercury. LED bulbs don’t contain mercury, and also provide a more even light. The LED backlit screens are also more energy efficient and is reported to increase the battery-life by an extra 30-60 minutes over older models. IPods currently use this technology and Apple has revealed their plan to have these LED monitors replace all their LCD monitors eventually. However, at the present time larger screens are more expensive and problematic to manufacture so we may have to wait awhile, currently only the newest 15″ MacBook Pro model has the LED offering, the 17″ model still has the conventional LCD screen.

There has been increased concern recently over mercury in landfills from LCD screens and the many other mercury containing products such as fluorescent lights, batteries, electrical switches, barometers, thermometers, some toys with lights and older latex paints. The mercury in our landfills have the potential to evaporate into the air or leach into the groundwater. After mercury is buried in the landfill, it can be converted by the landfill bacteria into a more toxic form, called organic or methylated mercury. This mercury can be a potent neurotoxin that can affect the brain, liver and kidneys, and cause developmental disorders in children. Young children and developing fetuses are especially at risk.
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