Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Knowledge is power. And if you have People Power 1.0, People Power’s new mobile Energy Services Platform, you can use knowledge to save power – and money. People Power 1.0 is an open and extensible cloud-based platform that allows you to monitor up-to-the-minute household energy usage from an iPhone or Android smartphone."

If you are ready to upgrade from using your Kill-o-Watt meter to track your power usage, and your electric company has not caught up witht he times, it may be time for some People Power. Living in a digital world means that we consume electricity; sometimes a lot, sometimes just a little. The way to minimize your electrical footprint though, is to know what you use that sucks up juice. What looks most useful is that you can track individual devices relatively easily thorugh the use of their powerstrips, instead of just getting the use of one device at a time, or of your whole household. While you can figure out what uses how much power the old way, a lot of extra hassle is involved, and that might just be enough hassle to push your energy tracking project away a few weeks, months or even years.

"It's no secret that AMD has fallen well behind Intel in the mobile CPU space, but the company intends to make up major ground by launching its first Phenom triple-core and quad-core processors for laptops. There will be new dual-core and single-core CPUs as well, continuing the Turion and Athlon brands, only they're followed by the number "II." Here are ten facts that you'll need to know about the new chips..."

I used to be a big fan of AMD CPUs, but over the past couple of years I've found myself scratching my head at their CPUs in the mobile space - it's like they don't quite get that power consumption is a critical component of mobile computing. Take the HP dv2 from early 2009 for example: a nice notebook by all accounts, but the dual-core AMD Neo CPU at 1.6 Ghz in it slurped down 18 watts of power. Read more...

Since first hearing about the Windows Home Server operating system a few years ago, I've been intrigued with Microsoft's efforts in this space. I was fortunate to be included in the first beta, for which I used my old software/hardware testing computer, cobbled together from an assortment of parts. I called this my "Frankenbox"; the machine was a standard mid-sized tower with a 400 watt power supply, a 3 Ghz Celeron CPU, and 2 GB of RAM. When I deployed it as my Windows Home Server, I added a few new parts to it: an Intel gigabit Ethernet card, a SATA card for installing extra hard drives, and of course a bunch of hard drives. It's easiest to show the hard drive arrangement with a screen shot. Read more...

I read about this tip in Maximum PC, tried it myself, and thought I'd share it with Digital Home Thoughts readers. It's pretty cool! This tip will tell Windows 7 to generate a power report, telling you which devices are mis-configured for optimal power savings.

To generate this report, here's what you do: first, click on the Start button, then type CMD. Right-click on the CMD program that will appear in the filtered list, and select Run As Administrator. A command-line box will appear. At the prompt, type in powercfg -energy. Wait 60 seconds, and Windows 7 will generate an HTML file called energy-report in the Systerm32 directory. Go find it and check out the results. Read more...