Windows 7 cutting my electric bill
Posted on Jan 25, 2010 by
Paul White
Being a web Developer I am well aware of how buggy the windows
operating systems can be. For this reason I like most techies, tend to not upgrade to the latest release Microsoft has to offer. I have been using
Windows XP for years. with no intension of switching to Vista. Vista in my mind was bloated, and had major issues with finding compatible drivers. It didn't run faster than XP, therefore I didn't make the switch.
Windows 7 was different. The fact that it
shared the same kernel as Server 2008 R2, and I had very good experiences with its Server based older brother. Some of my friends said it was awesome. It ran fast and the User interface made working on your computer fun again.
The initial installation of Windows 7
Of course the first thing I had to do was back up all my data, which took some time. But after I got that done, and I installed my new
RAID card ( Adaptec 4805SAS PCI-E 256MB ), and setup 4 x 15K 146GB
SAS drives in
RAID 0, I was ready to begin the actual install. The install went rather fast, and with the exception of one or two devices the windows included drivers worked well with everything.
Windows 7 saves energy
This is something I didn't expect. By default
windows 7 will put your system into standby if you are idle for 30 minutes or more. Normally my system at idle would still consume about 550 watts. Once
windows 7 went into standby mode, this dropped to about 25 watts. This was evident in my last electric bill, as it was under $100. Granted I know this is the winter months, but considering before I left my system on 24 / 7 and it would eat about 8 KWH / day, or 240 KWH / month. I figure the standby mode will save me about $15 in electricity each month.
Cheapest place to buy Windows 7 license key
I bought my license key off ebay. There are many sellers on there who I suspect buy them in a volume deal, and are now selling them. Granted this probably isn't the way Microsoft wants you aquire one, but I am sure they would rather you buy a legit license from a guy on ebay, rather than pirate
windows 7 all together. Granted if you buy your license this way you don't get any install DVD. But a quick hunt on the torrent sites will yield a copy.
Overall interface is great
I honestly like the layout of
windows 7. It makes working fun again. The little things like the animation of windows opening, and closing and the little pop sound, gives you a feel of getting stuff done. Only thing I don't like is it doesn't support SLI link on your video cards for 3 monitors. I have two video cards linked by the SLI cable, and when I enabled the SLI in
windows 7 I lost one of my monitors. Seems it can only be used on 1 or 2 monitors. Hopefully they will get this solved in a future Service Pack. Not a big deal as I don't really play games, but it would be nice none the less.
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