Little Miss Enviro Geek : Windows 7

Some personal news...

biwirth — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:24:00 GMT

Hello Dear Blog Readers,

(hmmm....that kinda sounds like the beginning of one of those SPAM emails)

I wanted to let you all know I am moving on from Microsoft and shall no longer be blogging here. I'll be moving an archive of these posts to my website http://www.greenitstrategy.com and shall continue blogging there on Green IT.

So what will I be doing now?

Well, I have decided to take some time off, write a book and maybe look into starting my own business. Regardless, you can always catch me through my website and please do feel free to visit me there.

Thank you to everyone who contacted me with their Green IT questions over the past two years and gave me feedback. I really appreciate your support and good luck with your own Green IT initiatives.

Kind Regards,

Bianca AKA Little Miss Enviro Geek

Windows 7 Power Management Webcast

biwirth — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 01:10:00 GMT

There is a great webcast recording on Windows 7 power management by Stephen Berard - session extract:

"Energy efficiency and green IT are two of the most active current topics in computing. In this webcast, we detail how the Windows 7 operating system helps improve energy efficiency through new power management innovations. We illustrate how IT professionals can improve battery life and power consumption using new Windows diagnostics utilities. We also show how applications can have a dramatic impact on power consumption, and we discuss how developers can optimize applications for energy efficiency."

Click here to check it out.

New Windows 7 Power Management Whitepaper

biwirth — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:19:00 GMT

There is a new Windows 7 BETA power management whitepaper available. Key points from the whitepaper include:

Improved idle efficiency - Windows 7 reduces resource utilisation when the system is idle and reduces or eliminates background activity on the system.
Timer Coalescing - for background activity that cannot be reduced, Windows 7 has been modified to defer then execute non-critical background activity at once. It also defers non-critical background activity when on battery power.
Trigger start services - when your computer boots it loads a number of system services in the background. In Windows 7 these services will now use 'trigger start' i.e. they require a physical event to occur before the service is started.
Enhancing power processing management (PPM) - driver support for latest PPM technologies.
Device power management - added the following low power enhancements:

Adaptive Display Brightness	dims the display after a period of time
Low Power Audio	support for latest Intel HD Audio low power specification
Bluetooth	"selective suspend" mode added
Networking	Disconnecting the network cable = automatically goes into low power state & vice-versa Improved wireless low power mode configurable with group policy

User Experience - includes enhancements including improved power troubleshooting and improved low battery alerting.
Enterprise Power Management - more granular control integrated, including:

Event Tracing & power request inspection	integrated into powercfg.exe with HTML based reports
Group Policy	more granular control of the new features like Device Power Management (table above) plus you can now use Group Policy Preferences as well as enforcement to provide more choice
New WMI power provider	allows Powershell 2.0 scripting of power data & settings
Power Policies	additional power policies built-in

Diagnostics in-the-box - the Windows Performance Toolkit helps IT Pros diagnose issues associated with power management.

Also as a side note, there are also two new other documents on the Microsoft Environment site: