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Most chargers have quiescent power consumption of less than 3 watts.

The more modern chargers have an auto-shutoff feature anyway.

I think we have much bigger things to worry about.

If you *truly* care about energy use - do you turn off your PC or at least your monitor, while you go out to lunch or go home for the night - or go to bed?

Leaving your laptop on for one hour unused is the equivalent of over 50 cell phone chargers left idle. For a Desktop machine, the figure is at least double for an average machine. More like 4X for a gaming machine with a power hungry graphics card.

Like I said, we have much bigger things to worry about - things that make a *lot* more impact than a cell phone charger left plugged in. True, millions of the things add up. But millions of PC's left one 24x7 add up a LOT more.

Lets not worry about cell chargers so much. It's getting silly.

I've read the HT:AT post, the Ubergizmo post and the Yanko Design post and I still cannot understand how this works. Can someone help?

You can save a lot of power on a laptop PC - and even more on a desktop - by enabling the various power-saving options in Windows or Mac OS X. Most PCs will allow you to put the monitor into sleep mode after a few minutes (10 - 15 is generally a good number), which can save an enormous amount of power. Similarly, you can set the hard drives to shut down completely after 20 minutes, saving even more juice. The whole machine can be thrown into sleep mode after half an hour, cutting power consumption to a trickle, and set to suspend to disc after an hour, cutting power consumption to virtually nothing.

Sunspot - right on.

BTW (for anyone that might be wondering) suspend-to-disk is called "hibernation" in Windows. It's not turned on by default in a plain-vanilla OS install. To see if it's enabled, bring up your screensaver tab (right-click on desktop, then click popterties, then you'll see the screensaver tab), click the "power" button in the lower right of that tab, and click the "enable hibernation" box.

The CPU alone uses almost as much energy as a 100W light bulb in many machines. Mattel makes toy ovens that bake real cookies with less energy. LOL.

Sooo....if I say "turn off hard drive" after 1 hour...does that mean that the computer shuts down completely and I lose any opened windows/work?

I've got my iBook at home fine tuned, but my PC at work needs a little help! Thanks for the isntructions for Windows, Boomer!