As the computer magazines all too often report, computers are a big-time waste of energy, and a single Internet keyword search in a browser causes an unexpectedly high peak in power consumption for network components all over the planet, manifesting itself in the results page. Many experts, who are probably related to salesmen, will tell you the "industry standard solution" is to use an operating system that supports all the "advanced power management" features, which will make all electronic parts of your computer significantly more environmentally friendly. Once you start investigating this problem, however, you cannot help noticing that this optimistic assessment is (almost) totally wrong.

In addition, I am not even talking about the extra amount of energy going into producing extra controllers and circuits for improved power management. Perhaps you have heard that many photovoltaic cells require more energy in manufacturing them than they will ever get back from sunlight during their entire life cycle. This observation is not directly related to computers, but it begs the same point.

Most of the benefits in terms of power-saving effects that have been advertised for "intelligent" peripheral or mainboard features seem like a marketing gag once you actually measure the difference (see Table 1).

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