I have been thinking about this too.

My understanding is that the main consumers of energy in a computer are the screen and the processor. For this discussion, the screen is not as important as the processor because most screens these days just shut off after some period of inactivity. That leaves us with the processor. I think most modern operating systems and processors greatly reduce the energy consumption when the processor is idle. As a consequence:

  • Needless compilation of packages is bad, as Tagae points out.
  • Running xscreensaver with funny neat graphics is also bad, you should set your screensaver/lock to just blank the screen. Note that even if your screen is off, your screensaver will still do a lot of needless computations that will just waste energy.

Interesting post. :-)

azul, Sun Dec 2 22:13:36 2007

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