In the last year, we have seen an escalation in the prices of both energy and food, reducing the purchasing power of millions of people. Nor has the rise in the Euribor contributed, making variable-interest mortgages considerably more expensive. Knowing the price of energy at certain times of the day allows us to use the devices that consume the most when electricity is cheaper, but what happens if our work tool is a computer?
Whether we work from home or study, the number of hours that we can spend in front of the computer throughout the day is very high and we cannot be aware of the time slots to use it, especially when it comes to work issues. Fortunately, we can follow a series of tricks so that the consumption of our computer is not a problem with the electricity bill at the end of the month.
- Suspend the equipment when we are not going to use it. The first trick that we can use when we know that we are going to use the PC for more than 10 minutes is to activate the sleep mode. By activating this mode, the device stops working completely, as if it were turned off, but it will show us the applications in the same state in which we left them before activating this mode. Considering that most of today’s computers are managed by an SSD, the process takes a few seconds. We can activate this function so that the computer is in charge of going to sleep through the power options available from the control panel.
- Use a suitable power plan. Although Windows power plans are more focused on reducing battery consumption on laptops, they apply to desktop computers as well. Windows offers us three power plans: Energy Saver, Balanced, and High Performance. The first of all makes minimal use of the processor, considerably reducing its consumption. The High performance plan takes advantage of the full capacity of the computer, which means an increase in electricity consumption. If we want a plan that allows us to complete the tasks in the shortest possible time, adjusting the time to do it and the consumption, the best thing we can do is select the balanced plan.
- Reduce screen brightness. Just as we must take into account the use of the processor, in the case of laptops, we must also take into account using the right and necessary brightness to be able to work in a comfortable and simple way. It is useless to have the brightness at its maximum level when with a lower brightness, we can see the screen and incidentally, we prevent visual fatigue from affecting our eyes.
- Use an SSD. Although it may seem strange, moving a mechanical storage drive requires a higher amount of electricity than an SSD drive. In addition, we are also going to considerably improve the speed of access to all the applications and files that we have stored on the computer.
- Disable dedicated graphics card. A dedicated graphics card consumes much more electricity than the graphics available on our PC’s motherboard. By default, Windows uses the dedicated graphics (if we have one installed) instead of the native one, so in the long run, the electricity consumption increases compared to the consumption with the integrated graphics. As long as we don’t need it to work throughout the day, we can deactivate it without problems and, when we need it, activate it temporarily.
