Green PC

What is Power Saver Mode? How does it help save energy?

As the environment concerns loom large over mankind, reducing power consumption is a priority for all computer users, whether office goers or home users, to control costs and minimize their impact on the environment.

One of the ways to reduce power usage is to follow proper power management which is an easy way to save energy and money. Whether you are powering down your PC and its monitor or your laptop, you can help save energy and environment.

You can use the power saver mode if you want your computer to be switched on and yet save energy.

You can easily activate the Power Saver Mode in your Pc, depending on your Operating System.

All the Windows operating system have the Power Saver option. Go to Control Panel and look for this option. You can choose the best balance for your PC, depending on your requirements, between the PC’s performance and power saving.

Power Saver Tools – There are a number of Power Saver Tools available which when installed on your computer will switch to power saver mode whenever your computer is idle or a peripheral device is not in use.

You can activate both AC (plug-in) and DC (battery) power profiles on your laptops.

Power Saver Mode offer three levels of power saving on your PC – Sleep, hibernate and hybrid sleep.

Sleep

When you use the power button on your computer, Windows puts your PC in an energy-saving mode called sleep. While your PC is in sleep mode, Windows saves all open documents and programs to memory. You can quickly resume your PC to full power operation from its sleep mode and access these documents. PC in this state consumes only 2% of the energy used when running normally.

Hibernate

Hibernation is also a power saver mode in your PC, just like sleep. Hibernation saves all your open documents and programs to computer hard disk and turns off the PC. Of all the power saver modes in Windows, hibernation uses the least energy. This mode is ideal for computers which are used by the same users for a long time and it is tedious to shut down the computer every time. User sessions can be restored easily by pressing the power button on the PC or by few mouse-clicks.

Hybrid Sleep

This is another power saver mode designed primarily for desktops. Before going into hybrid sleep, Windows will save any open documents and programs to memory and then switch the PC to low-power state. In hybrid sleep, if there is a sudden power-failure, Windows will recover the data from the hard disk. If the documents are saved to memory, they cannot be restored.

A PC in idle mode eats up the same amount of energy as in full-power mode. However, if you put your PC in power saver mode, you save energy and money. In case of a power failure, you might lose all the unsaved data on an idle PC. However, your documents remain safe in power saver mode, even during power cuts, as they are saved to the computer memory or hard disk and can be opened easily.