Spectacular news from the Verdiem corporation. It’s offering a free tool to help to save the planet!

“Today Verdiem is announcing the availability of Edison, a free energy monitoring  application that allows eco-conscious consumers to actively control their PC’s energy consumption. Verdiem helps Brits save money on their energy bills and fight climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions from homes across the UK.”

And how does this fabulous tool work? By, erm, changing your Windows power-management settings. It gives you a little slider that you can slide between ’save less’ and ’save more’. And it changes three – yes, three! – settings: display timeout, hard disk power-down, and suspend timeout.

It does offer one feature that Windows doesn’t – you can switch between work-time and non-work-time settings based on a schedule. But a moment’s thought will reveal that there’s no point. Set your computer to suspend after two hours and, well, it will suspend after two hours. And stay suspended all weekend. One lot of settings is all you need.

Before you can take advantage of the altruistic philanthropy of Verdiem, you’ll be needing to register so it can send you an activation email.

The cynic in you might think it was a data-gathering exercise rather than a gift bestowed upon the world by a concerned company. Who knows? Anyway, it’s quite pretty, it estimates how much energy you’re saving and some people might find it useful. You can download it from here.