Engineering team develops software to conserve energy

Because the use of your personal computers adds to global warming, making your computer energy-efficient can help reduce the effect of greenhouse gases on the Earth.

Realising that the use of computer causes energy wastage of about 50 per cent, a group of engineering students from the School of Information Technology at King Mongkut's University of Technology, Thon Buri, has come out with a new software to help computer users reduce electricity consumption.

The team, comprising Prawin Phichitnitikorn, Rachata Surattakul and Chinapong Angsuchotmetee, has developed the Conergy++ software for the Windows operating system to control power management. The software, once installed, will automatically manage power consumption for the user.

"The users do not need to adjust any power-management settings as the software will take care of them on its own," Prawin said. "The software consists of two main features - Energy Saving and Collaboration of People."

The first feature allows computers to be tweaked to reduce power consumption. Prawin said when the computer is switched on, the software will monitor computing usage. If it finds that just a few applications are being used, the system will adjust the CPU's energy consumption as per the tasks being performed at the time, or go into standby or hibernate mode if the system is idle.

Rachata said the second feature has been designed on a Web-services concept, which will allow the estimation of electricity consumption and amount of carbon-dioxide emissions.

Rachata said this information, collected from every computer equipped with Conergy++, would then be sent to the central server to create a database.

The idea, he said, was to develop a free Web services site to allow users to form a community where they can keep track of relevent developments on global warming and receive estimates of how much energy their efforts have saved.