Features

Buy low-power, cheaper hardware

Today's hardware is much more power-efficient than the kit of old. Latter Pentium 4 processors consumed more than 100W by themselves, before you even start to take into account the power consumption of other components and the inefficiencies of the power supply. By contrast, the more frugal of our small form factor PCs in this month's Labs consume 35W in total at maximum load, and as little as 20W when idle.

An example shows the costs involved. If switched on for 12 hours a day, an old PC that consumes 250W - which is not a wildly over-the-top figure by any means - will chew through 1,095kWh of energy per year. Assuming an average price of about 10p per kilowatt-hour, you're looking at a bill of £128 inc VAT per year. With the ultra-frugal MSI Titan 700 that bill drops to £10.

If energy costs rise by as much as feared, a low-power PC becomes even more attractive. The BBC has reported prices could rise by 40%, in which case you can practically pay for your new PC through the energy saved in one year. If you plump for an MSI Titan, you'll get savings of £165 against the cost of £212 for the PC itself.

The Titan isn't especially fast though, with only around a third of the performance of a dual-core Pentium D. For a new PC that's as fast as the old, such as the Novatech NBox Pro with its benchmark score of 0.91, you'll still be saving a fair whack, with an idle power of 26W generating a saving of £161 per year against your old

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Pentium 4 machine.

Up to £165 a year, compared withan old Pentium 4 PC.

Turn off devices on standby

It's estimated that UK households now spend around 10% of their electricity bill on standby power, according to the Energy Saving Trust. And with electricity bills widely predicted to take a sharp upturn in the autumn, now is the time to make sure you're extinguishing all the unnecessary standby power.

If you don't want to invest in the OneClick power strip, mentioned below, plug household devices grouped in one area (such as the TV, DVD player and digital box) into one power strip, and make sure it's switched off at the mains when not in use.

It might be a tad on the cheeky side, but charging gadgets such as MP3 players or mobile phones at work - even discreetly using a USB cable - will save cash over the course of a year.

You can also encourage family and colleagues to shut down idle equipment by downloading the PC wallpaper or ordering our special stickers at www.pcpro.co.uk/switchoff.

Roughly £50, if you eliminate standby power from the average annual electricity bill of around £500.

Buy an energy-saving power strip

PC Pro has long praised the merits of OneClick's range of power strips, which work on a very simple principle: plug your PC (or laptop) into the main socket and all your peripherals into the rest. As soon as you place your computer into standby, the strip then cuts power to the rest of the devices.

As PC Pro's own tests have shown, the savings soon rack up: over five years, an "average" setup with a printer, monitor and router will cost around £100 if left on their default settings (and that's not including the PC or laptop). A OneClick IntelliPanel costs £40 inc VAT.