Save Money With Your Computer

Following up from the last post Save Money by Not Wasting Water, where I explained how by saving water you're also saving money, I'd like to mention a few simple things you can do with yoru home computer to save some money.

The first one is by changing your power-saving settings for your hard drive. You can set it so that the hard drive(s) power off after a certain time of inactivity. This is a good way to not only save electricity but also to prolong the life of your hard drives. I set mine to half an hour, so they only run while I'm busy editing stuff. If I'm just surfing the internet, the hard drive shuts down as its not needed.

Another way is obvious but so many people don't do it and that's to set your screen to go onto standby after a period of inactivity. As it gets used more, you can set a farily short time - I use 10 minutes, and that saves some electricity, although not much but more importantly prolongs the life of your screen.

If you have things like external speakers, or a printer etc that runs of one of those little transformer cubes for plugs, then if you're not using them, unplug them. You'd be shocked at how much electricity those things use even when the item they are supposed to be powering is switched off - they still drain power. How crappy is that! I used to leave my printer turned on all day with my PC until I realized that I might only use it once or twice to print something in that time. The rest of the time it was sitting there draining electricity for nothing.

Even better, rather than using external speakers at all, wear lightweight headphones. It not only saves the power that speakers need, but also keeps you in your mum's good books as she used to go crazy with all the racket that used to come out of my PC before I started wearing headphones! Plus the stereo sound is far superior in good headphones to some cheaper speakers.

Ok, they are my save money tips for today!

Save Money With Chelsea