Try Microsoft’s Energy Savings Calculator

If the World Earth Day 2010 has inspired you to start thinking about your own energy usage and how eco-friendly your home is, you should give Microsoft’s Energy Savings Calculator a try!

Microsoft’s energy savings calculator can give you useful tips how you can save a lot of energy and consequently a lot of money. Based on three factors, area, size and age of your house, the calculator will give you valuable tips, e.g. to replace incandescent light bulbs with higher efficiency bulbs or to set your computer monitor to use low-power or sleep mode when idle.

Use Windows 7′s hibernation feature

If you often go idle for long times, I’d recommend to use the hibernation feature of Windows 7 as well. If your computer goes idle, Windows 7 can create a copy of your currently running applications and completely power-off (and save a lot of energy). When you have to access your PC again it will only take seconds until you can use it again.

Tutorial: How to enable Hibernation in Windows 7

If you use the hibernation feature and your mouse is not working after Hibernation, read this.