As PC Pro’s resident “Eco Warrior” – a term that’s used with more than a hint of sarcasm by the rest of the team – I was chosen to attend the recent Green IT conference in London.

All the speakers gave food for thought, but one stood out in particular; James Page has over a decade’s wireless engineering experience at Nokia, and is an active member of the Green Party, too. He was also speaking independently, so was probably free to be a little more forthcoming than those there under a corporate banner.

He was talking specifically about the environmental impact of wireless technology, in particular, mobile phones and the infrastructure that supports them. In the past it’s been the hardware that we, as consumers, interact with that gets the negative attention with regards to power consumption.

“We’ve had the finger pointed towards mobile phone chargers for a while, that’s something that I think we’ve absolutely cracked,” says Page, speaking of the so-called vampire power consumption of power adapters.

Handsets are also a solved (or at least improving) problem, he explained, as customers push the industry towards efficiency by demanding models with longer talk time.

The main problem is that the infrastructure is so inefficient. Much as your home computer’s energy use is just the tip of the iceberg, with power being consumed by servers all around the world to serve you in different ways, the network infrastructure consumes vastly more power than your handset does.

It’s not that the hardware itself is inherently inefficient, but that it’s duplicated several times over because of the way that networks operate in the UK. In fact, the total amount of power used by the four largest mobile operators in the UK exceeds that used by the entire rail network of the whole country.

“Should the regulator actually have the remit to start looking at energy efficiency as well? There’s a lot of duplication and redundancy in the group of networks as a whole,” says Page, and that “an enormous amount of energy could be saved”.

Unfortunately, that just isn’t the case at the moment. “They simply don’t believe that they’ve got the legal ability to take environmental issues into account,” says Page, who said he imagines that in certain circumstances they could themselves face legal troubles if they did attempt to.

You may notice that they’re the same size, which is a bit of a disappointment; a self-proclaiming revolutionary update could do with taking up a bit less pocket space, I think. Nevertheless, it’s still perfectly portable – just not as much as my non wind-up MP3 player is.

The wind-up handle is also exactly the same, and we got a similar charge from using it: crank like crazy for five minutes and you will get the majority of the way through a short album, while you rest your aching hand.

The software, though, looks like it’s come on a long way, which is a relief, although it’s still infuriatingly complicated to use and in need of yet another dollop of refinement. Keep your eyes peeled for a full review coming soon…

In the current issue of PC Pro, which has just hit the newsstands, I’ve written a feature in which I document my attempt to leave the National Grid for a week and run my mobile phone, MP3 player and notebook on solar and wind power. If you want to know how I got on then you’ll have to go and buy an issue, but I’ve already received an email from one reader to let me know that he’s been investigating exactly this sort of thing for 16 years already.

Chris Dixon has been playing around with sustainable power for well over a decade, starting with a wind-powered 386, and has got more interested in solar power in recent years as the cost of panels has fallen. The image above is of two 15 Watt panels he has installed in his garden on top of his shower room.

“I set them up on a home built frame so they could be rotated and tilted to track the sun,” explains Chris. “This increases their output considerably but is a hassle! So now I point them due South and tilt them three times during the year to get an optimum sort of position.”

As well as these panels, which after three years have started to degrade slightly, he also has a mono crystalline panel, which is “far more resilient and more powerful for the same surface area”, and outputs 20 watts.

The electricity harvested from these panels is stored in a battery, but a regulator sits in-between to make sure that the battery doesn’t get overcharged.

“Over charging is a sure fire way of killing a battery so the reg box is essential. A deep cycle battery is best as it can stand being discharged more than, say, a car battery. The leisure batteries are cheaper but not as good,” says Chris.

Chris obviously has a great deal of experience with this sort of thing, and his set up can run his 1GHz ThinkPad for three to four hours a day. If anyone has any questions for him then please leave them in the comments – it would be a shame to waste his expertise.

It’s fair to say that we were quite impressed by the Chillblast Fusion Juggernaut. A powerful 9800 GX2 graphics card, Core 2 Quad Q9450 processor and 24in Samsung screen certainly made an impression in the Labs – and it made everyone who saw it quite jealous. We all wanted one.

Except that I now have a feeling that the Juggernaut’s crown as top monster PC may be under threat. We’ve just taken delivery of the Mesh Ultimate XT9450 GTO and, well – to paraphrase the slogan of a particularly nasty meat snack – it’s a bit of an animal. As you can see, it’s housed inside a monolithic Cooler Master Cosmos, which is certainly a good start.

A quick peek at the specification reveals that there’s a few key areas where the Mesh may lose ground to the Juggernaut – or outpace it. The GPU, for instance, is a brand-new GeForce GTX 280 that we’ve reviewed today and been hugely impressed by, and there’s 4GB of 1033MHz DDR3 RAM. Both of these components are better, at least on paper, than their Juggernaut counterparts.

The processor is the same – the Q9450 – although the Juggernaut was overclocked, and the Mesh isn’t. The latest contendor, though, does include a Blu-ray drive; the Chillblast machine made do with a paltry DVD writer.

The Mesh also a 28in screen. Twenty-eight inches! Blimey.

Look out for a full review soon, and see if the Fusion Juggernaut’s title of A-listed Enthusiast PC is about to be unceremoniously stolen.