Ok so i just read Davey Winders blog about the effects having a black google page rather then a white one would have on the enviroment (A very good post by the way Davey). To me the concept of this sounded rather silly and off track from ways that we the IT comunity and other people who use computers actually could make a difference.

This got me thinking about the some of the other things that we could start doing out of habbit that actually would make a difference to the enviroment. The two that i came up with straight away were turning our monitors off when we are away from them for more then a few minutes and turning the brightness on our monitors down a couple of notches( not sure how much of a difference this one woud acctually make although i know that it does for laptops to increase battery life).

What things can you guys think of that we could all start doing to reduce the amount of electricity that our computers and other IT equipment are using?

Turn your computer off at night and while at work/school. Like I'm about to do

Lol that was a really fast reply lol. I think that should also count for things like External hardrives and other accessories that you may have for your computer that require a seperate power source. I think for those of you that cant stand the thought of turning your computer off while you sleep because of bit torrent clients I think a good idea for you guys would be looking into one of these new external hard drives with a built in Bit Torrent Client. Although these still require some power its nowhere near the ammount required to run a full computer and it means you can still leave your torrents running overnight or while your at work.

Print on both sides of paper.

The Black Google posting can be found here by the way, in case anyone wants to read it first...

don't worry about it all... In a few years the "environmentalists" will have a new scare program centered around "global cooling", just as they did in the 1980s ("global warming" wasn't invented until the 1990s, or rather reinvented as they'd also had it in the 1950s but quite correctly noone took them seriously back then).

It's already here. As I type, I am watching a "Mega-Disasters" on History channel predicting exactly that.

Also, don't forget "The Day After Tomorrow".


IT will cause more pollution, as MS and Intel keep making people upgrade their computers every 3 years.

And don't forget all of the NTSC TV set solid waste when HDTV becomes mandatory (thanks to Bill Gates - we had a compatible system until he stuck his nose into it).

Personally i think the whole black google thing was just a cheap shot at google.

If you think they were taking a shot at Google, don't you think they'd be suggesting some darker-colored search engine that isn't based on Google? They just chose Google because it's the largest search engine, and because the author obviously didn't have anything better to do.

exactly thats what i mean by cheap shot. What i mean is that there are alot more important and effective things that we could then using a black search engine.