I helped Poe with a reading assignment tonight.  He's in 2nd grade now, and his homework frequently includes an assignment called "Read a book for 20 minutes" which usually involves reading a book for 20 minutes.  Tonight, the book of choice was Dr. Seuss' Fox in Socks.  It's an endless series of tongue-twisters, but he got through it pretty well.  And it reminded me of an old favorite of mine...

Dr Seuss Explains Why Computers Sometimes Crash

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port
And the bus is interrupted at a very last resort
And the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash
And your data is corrupted cause the index doesn't hash
Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house
Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse
But your packets want to tunnel unto another protocol
That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse
Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang
'Cuz sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!

When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy in the disk
And the macrocode instructions cause unnecessary risk
Then you'll have to flash the memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM.
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your Mom!

I'm a bit of a freak when it comes to computers - even some of me geeky friends regard me as an aberration because I have four workstations and two laptops in my house at any given time.  They all serve a purpose, but I won't get into that now, because the point of this post is this: computers use electricity.  The ten thousand dollar question is: how much do they use?

To answer this, I ordered a Kill-A-Watt from Amazon.com.  It's a nifty little device that allows you to easily measure how much electricity any given device uses.  Simply plug the meter into the wall and your device into the meter.  It almost instantly tell you how many watts-per-hour (Watt-Hours, or wH) the item draws.  After that, it's a matter of simple math to figure out what your electricity bill will be.  In my neck of the woods, we pay 10 cents per kilowatt-hour (KwH), so divide your wH by 1000 (to get KwH) and multiply by .10 (the rate charged) to get your cost for using the device.

The Computer
I measured our computer in the den for starters.  It's a Compaq Presario with a 3GHz Intel Celeron chip inside.  Under normal usage, it draws about 101 watts per hour on average (not counting the monitor, printer, or anything else - just the computer).  We probably use it about 3 hours a day - the rest of the day, it goes to standby mode, during which it draws about 2 watts per hour.  Over the course of one day, that means it draws about 345 watts.  Multiply that by 30 (days, in your average month), and I come up with 10,350 watt-hours.  Divide by 1000 to get 10.35 kilowatt-hours.  Now multiply that by 10 cents (0.10), and I find that it costs me $1.04 per month to run that computer (again, not counting the monitor, scanner, printer, or other peripherals).

Now, for those of you paying attention to that last bit, you noticed that the computer was using 2 watts in standby mode.  What happened when I turned it off?  It still drew 1 watt.  That concept of drawing power when turned off came up again and again when I measured more devices.  More on that later.

Monitors
Now, how about the computer monitor?  Well, on the aforementioned Compaq, we have a 19" Philips CRT monitor - you know, the old-school, big, tube-type that takes a lot of space on the desktop.  Under normal usage, it drew anywhere from 66 to 85 watts, depending on what was on screen.  The more white, the greater the power draw, so if you spend more time in Word, or on most web pages, there's going to be a lot of white, hence, more power draw.  In the standby state, I found the CRT was drawing 6 watts.  Taking into account the usage and formulas described above, we arrive at a monthly cost of $1.06 - slightly more than the computer itself.

Contrast that with what I found on my 19" Samsung LCD (alas, it's no longer available unless you want the widescreen) that I use on my main workstation.  It consumed only 25 watts during usage - regardless of what was onscreen.  And under both standby mode and in the off state, it consumed 0 to less than half a watt.  In the same usage scenario as above, that means it costs less than a quarter a month to run.  Tres slick.

The Plot Thickens
Then, I found the pig of the household - the homebuilt Athlon XP 2500 machine that constitutes my main workstation.  There's nothing really outstanding about it - it has the aforemention Athlon chip, 1GB of ram, a measly 64MB GeForce MX440 graphics card, a 90GB and a 20GB hard disk, and a CDROM drive.  This thing pulled 110 watts at idle, and up to nearly 130 watts at full bore.  Standby mode still pulled 62 watts, but it wasn't even configured for that, so it was pulling nearly 110 watts all day long.  A little math showed that it was costing me roughly $7.50 a month.  The bulk of that is due to leaving it on 24/7 and not configuring it to go to sleep.

Miscellany
The other interesting and somewhat annoying discoveries were from the television end of things.  We still have a late-80's era 25" Zenith tube TV that drew a respectable 60 watts during normal usage (contrast to the 19" Philips' 75 watt draw), but drew 10 watts when turned off.  That's just abominable.  Our newly acquired 32" Vizio LCD widescreen pulls about 80 watts during use, but nothing when turned off.  That means we could watch the Viz for 3 hours a day, every day, for a whole year, and it would cost the same as just leaving the Zenith plugged in - without ever turning it on.

The other annoying thing was the DirecTV HD satellite box.  It drew 20 watts all the time - turned on or off.  That equates to about $1.55 a month.  Not that you can do anything about it - unplug it, and you have to go through a 10 minute download every time you plug it back in - or just plain get rid of it.  But from what I've heard, cable TV boxes aren't any better.

So What Is The Moral Of The Story?
Well, I can't exactly tell you that investing in better stuff will save you hundreds of dollars.  I won't make back the $25 cost of the Kill-A-Watt in a month - but I'll likely save close to a hundred dollars over the next year.  You can likely shave a bit off your electric bill by following a couple simple guidelines:

• LCD monitors trump CRTs.  They can draw as little as one-third of the electricity for comparably sized screen.  Added bonus:  you'll get a lot of your deskspace back.
• Either turn your computer off when you're not using it, or make sure it's set up to either sleep or hibernate when not in use.  Newer computers (3 years old or less) have better power management skills.  Older ones - probably not so much.
• Buying a new computer or have a slightly older one that you're wondering if you should hang on to?  Pay attention to what's powering it - specifically, the CPU.  AMD's Athlons and Intel's older Pentium 4's are pigs.  The Intel Core Duo and Core 2 Duo chips are nice and fast, and draw a lot less power.  Apple's new Mac Minis, iMacs, and MacBooks all use them, and they use very little power.

I've carped now and then about the relative merits and downfalls of various computer operating systems - primarily Windows, Linux, and Mac.  Last week, Apple introduced the latest version of their operating system - Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard.   I don't know why Apple insists on naming their systems after large felines - previously, we were treated to Tiger, Panther, Jaguar, Puma, and Cheetah.  They've also got Lynx and Cougar trademarked, so presumably we can look forward to an operating system named after older sluts who chase young men.

Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced their latest operating system - Vista.  That marked their first major public offering since XP almost 7 years ago. Leopard is the first new Mac OS in roughly two years.  The thing that struck me about these two releases is the difference in price.  The Mac OS - unless you're purchasing it for a server - is $130, period.  On the Windows end of things, it gets a little blurry. They offer 5 different versions of Vista - six, if you happen to live in a third world toilet.  But for the sake of discussion, let's say we live in the U.S. of A., so there are only 5 versions. 

If you're really cheap - there's the el-cheapo Vista Home Basic edition, retailing at $199.  With this, though, be warned that you're getting a severely hobbled version of Windows with many limitations.  If you're migrating from XP, it's not really an upgrade.

The next step up is Vista Home Premium, retailing at $239.  This is the first edition that may actually represent an upgrade - from the standard edition of XP, but not from XP Media Center Edition.  There are still some limitations on this one, notably in the area of network connections and hardware support.

The next two are aimed at businesses, one retailing at $299, and the other only available through a bulk licensing agreement, so they don't really apply to the general user.

The final version, Vista Ultimate Edition, retails at a whopping $399.  This is the only version that truly represents an upgrade from the previous consumer level Windows OS, and more or less competes with other modern OS offerings.

Certainly $399 for the top Windows OS versus $130 for the top Mac OS is pretty lopsided.  Why does Microsoft believe it can command such a higher price?  Inflation?  Well, let's look at this historically.  The last major consumer Windows OS was XP, released in 2001, at a retail price of $199.  Mac's offering at the time was OS X 10.1 - retail price, still $130.  The really major Windows release prior to that was Windows 95, released in 1995.  Retail price?  $209.  Mac's offering at that time?  OS 7.5, retailing at...$130.  Back then, there was even a major operating system by IBM known as OS/2.  That also retailed for $130. 

So going back a dozen years, Microsoft has always priced their OS at 50% more than the competition.  Now, though, they're a positively ludicrous 200% higher.  Are we really to believe it's worth three times more than the Mac OS? And worth twice as much as the Windows of a dozen years ago?  Hell, you can get a mighty fine Linux OS for free.  Ubuntu linux is a very nice, comfortable OS, and I'd probably be using it a lot more if I weren't thrilled silly over my MacBook Pro with OS X 10.4.  They say you get what you pay for, but I'd counter that money can't buy happiness.

At work, our TS team is sticking their collective big toe in the Vista waters.  They're in charge of all our technology - from phones to servers to email to our desktops.  'TS' officially stands for 'Technology Services', but really means 'Tough Shit'.  I once teased them that their motto should be 'TS - We Put The No In Technology'.  They loved it and wanted to put it on a banner on the wall.

But I digress.

So, these brave geeks are trying out Microsoft's new operating system, and the experience has turned them into a bunch of whining children - basically, like the people they usually bitch about having to put up with.  It's slower...I can't figure out how to do [fill-in-the-blank]...it's unstable.  I, of course, being on my new Mac kick, take full advantage of the opportunity to make snide remarks and generally act like a Mac snob.  I made sure they knew that when I upgraded my 7-year-old iMac to the latest OS X (two major versions worth of upgrade) that it ran faster and more stable than before.

I also made sure they knew about the virtual Windows computer that I'm running on my MacBook.  I'm using a program called Parallels which allows me to run Windows right from my Mac desktop.  There are several of these types of programs out there - Microsoft has one too, called Virtual PC - and they're all kinda neat.  You can run many different operating systems as though they were just another program.  For instance, if you have a particular game you like that only runs on Windows 95, you can run a virtual Windows 95 computer right from your Windows XP desktop - and run the game on that "computer".

The downside - you're not really running the operating system directly on the hardware of your real, physical computer.  There's a software layer in between that slows things down.  I run a virtual Windows machine on my nice, new, fast Sun/Windows XP workstation at work so that I can test websites in different versions of Internet Explorer, and it's slow - like running XP on a ten year old computer.

But.  (Didn't you know there was a 'but' coming?)

Not the virtual Windows machine on my MacBook.  No sir - it is The Fastest Windows Machine I Use.  No question, no doubt.  Even including the aforementioned shiny new Sun workstation.  I don't know how they did it, but they did.  I would venture to guess that it's a combination of Intel's stellar Core 2 Duo chip, the speed and power of OS X, and some pretty good programming by the people who make Parallels.  It's a wonderful, nearly seamless experience.  I think it might even be able to run Vista.  Not that I want to - I hear it will make you cry.