How much power does my phone consume?

Posted by BA on Jul 19, 2010 in Green Computing, Mobile, Smartphones, Technology, Telecommunication | 17 comments

Did you ever think how much power does your cell phone consume? Yes, we know it will be negligible but once the number of consumers has grown to a very high number all around the world, the power being consumed as a whole may be significant?

Let’s do some simple maths and we are not getting into any fancy tools here. It’s simple arithmetic. You will need to find three numbers about your phone before you start this calculation. The numbers are:

1. The battery capacity in mAh (milli-Ampere-hour)
2. The voltage output of the battery ( volts )
3. Total Talk time
4. Total Standby Time (optional)

Netbooks are better than Notebooks – Green Computing

Posted by BA on May 22, 2010 in Green Computing | 9 comments

We have been discussing the green-computing advantage of Laptops over the Desktop computers when it comes to power consumption. Today we’ll take the discussion one step further in our green-computing section.

All of us have heard about net-books, the miniature versions of the laptops/notebook PCs. Capabilities of the Netbooks are good enough for normal use, desktop computing and web-surfing etc. The advantage they give you is the size, handling and power consumption.

We discussed the power consumption advantage of Laptops over Desktops in a previous post. We discussed that Laptops typically take around 60 to 65 watts of power during normal operation. An average Netbook running on Intel Atom processor consumes around 30 to 35 watts of power during normal use. This is actually around half of the power consumption of Notebooks and Laptops.

So if you are not a power user and desktop processing, chatting, Internet surfing is all what you have to do on your PC, prefer a Netbook instead of a Notebook.

I know a number of Netbook haters out there not because of their capabilities in terms of specifications but due to their small size, very small screen and no optical drive. You can purchase a few components and make a good desktop docking station for your Netbook to overcome these issues. For example, you can buy a larger LCD screen, a USB Keyboard, Mouse and a USB external optical drive. While you are on the go, you live with the small components and when you are back home, you can enjoy a full fledged computing experience right out of your netbook with a lower power consumption.

Green Computing Bottom Line

Don’t use desktop computers at all. Use either laptops, notebooks or netbooks for a green-computing advantage. You should prefer a netbook over the notebooks and laptops as well as they consume the lowest power of them all.

Monitor Power Consumption – CRT vs LCD

Posted by BA on Feb 14, 2010 in Green Computing | 35 comments

This is a known fact that CRT monitors take more  power as compared to the LCDs.

If you have a CRT monitor, the big monitor with the bloated tail and a few KGs weight, you are consuming the most power. The power consumption of a CRT monitor ranges from 100watts to 300 watts depending on the size, model and make of the monitor. Typically, the older models used to consume more power and newer ones are better in terms of power consumption.

If you have a flatter variant of a screen that could be a TFT, LCD, LED or Plasma screen, you are using less power as compared to the CRT monitors. Most of the laptops, hand held devices like pdas and mobile phones are using this kind of displays these days. If you are using LCD, TFT or LED monitor for your computer as external display, your typical power consumption is somewhere between 50 watts to 200 watts depending on the size. For example this 15” LCD I have consumes 55 watts. There can be screens that take even less power.

This worksheet provides a more quantitative way of calculating your poswer consumption depending on different monitors you are using.

http://downloads.techrepublic.com.com/5138-10589-5698031.html?tag=content%3bleftCol

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