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Going Green with UniBlue LocalCooling

Posted on April 3, 2008 at 10:32 am by Kolgoth">Kolgoth

So as you may have noticed, there’s a new section on the navigation menu titled “Going Green”…  I think most who visit this site will agree with me, there’s WAY too much marketing spin on the whole “Going Green” movement as of late.  I will say though, that although I can’t stand the marketing spin of it, I also believe that most everyone will agree that regardless of the reasons behind it, a mass focus on helping reduce our emissions and footprint on the planet and environment is NOT a bad thing.  Even if it’s 1 PC at a time!  So what’s my latest installation on my PC?

A freeware application known as LocalCooling developed by UniBlue Research Labs.  UniBlue has released LocalCooling as their way to help people conserve energy 1 PC at a time.  They are also marketing their product towards corporations with multiple PCs - imagine the savings when you effectively manage the power of 2000+ PC’s instead of a single PC!

LocalCooling is a very simple program.  It provides a few power management profiles that integrate with whatever power management system you are, or are not, using today.  It tracks the amount of energy you save using the more efficient power settings.  It displays your savings as # of trees, gallons of oil and total kilowatt hours.  It tracks your savings over the lifetime of your account and displays them locally on your PC and their website.  I’ll get to that more in a second though.  In addition to this it theoretically displays the total number of watts your PC is drawing under normal conditions.  It doesn’t calculate in real time; I believe it just gives a few real-world power usage numbers.  My laptop weighs in at 172 watts which doesn’t sound too off considering the power packed into this thing.  I’ve heard of some desktop PC’s being significantly off (WAY under) but again - it’s just an estimate using a database of information collected by the fine folks over at UniBlue.  To determine what #’s to give you, they auto-detect your hardware.  For the most part, this works very well.  The only qualm I have is that apparently my laptop has a 28″ screen - I’m impressed!!!  Those concerned with the footprint the application will consume on your PC needn’t worry…  It consumes a whopping 4.82 MB of ram and 4.82 MB of HDD space.  Right now it only works on Windows Vista or XP at the moment but they’re working on other varieties as I type this…

There’s also a “Group” feature which fulfills my ultra-competitive need!  When you sign up you can join a Group (or create one for your own personal circle of friends, your geographical region or your organization) and your total numbers for all of the grouped PCs will be tracked and included in their rankings.  There are 2 categories, Last Week and Lifetime, for both individuals and groups.

Seriously though - it’s a fantastic application and a great cause.  Worst case scenario maybe you’ll save a few $$ a year in power savings.  It doesn’t cost anything to use and it is spyware free.  Overall, it’s definitely worth the few bits of ram and space it requires - if nothing else than because I think it’s cool knowing how much energy I save when my monitor is powered off, my HDD spins down or I hibernate/shutdown my PC…

Get your own copy of LocalCooling2 here!

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