Green Daily

I ran across an interesting product called the Ecobutton today. It's a little gadget that you can plug into the USB port on your Windows PC. When you press the button, your PC will go into an energy saving mode, thus saving you money on your electric bill while making the Earth a bit happier. At least that's the idea behind the Ecobutton. In practice, it's billed as an item with two major purposes:

1. Let users save electricity
2. Let marketers put their name on an environmentally responsible piece of plastic which they can then send out to clients or prospective customers

But while the Ecobutton purportedly puts your computer into a special "ecomode" to save energy, as far as I can tell, ecomode is just a fancy word for hibernate, which is something that pretty much any computer running Windows 2000, XP or Vista can do without an Ecobutton.
When you put your computer into sleep mode (which is often the default setting when you close your laptop lid, for example), your PC still draws some energy from the battery or wall outlet. That's because all of your data is being saved to RAM, which requires power. If the power goes away, so does all of the data stored in RAM. Hibernate mode, on the other hand, saves all of your information to the hard disk, which does not need power. So if you put your computer into hibernate mode when you're not using it, you can save all of your running programs just as if you were in sleep mode. And your computer will use almost no energy at all, just as if you had turned it off altogether.

The reason people don't use hibernate more often is because it eats up hard drive space and it takes longer to resume from hibernation than from sleep mode. But there's really no reason anyone should need a plastic dongle which actually draws power from your USB port in order to save electricity. And did I mention that the Ecobutton lights up? Because that's necessary.

[via Environmental Leader]