Kurt Shintaku's Blog

One of the significant business value benefits of Windows Vista is its centrally-managable Power Management. 

In English, Windows Vista out-of-the-box provides the ability to save corporate customers actual money in the way of Electrical Power savings. 

How is this done?  Through the usage of Group Policy, (a set of rules that get pushed down over the network to a Windows Vista workstation) administrators can specifically tell specific groups of workstations (or ALL workstations) to minimize the usage of power on components of workstation hardware – getting as specific and fine-grained as the hard drive, the CPU, the graphics adapter, the display, etc.  And these rules can be time-specific.

For example:

1. An organization may want to have all their workstations go to "sleep" if no one’s using them after 6:00PM.  Windows Vista now makes that possible out of the box when using the Professional or Enterprise Editions of the product.
   
2. An IT group may want to have workstation display’s "Energy Saver" (sleep) features of their monitors kick in if the machines aren’t being used for 15 minutes during the day, which can be useful during lunch.
   
3. A company may choose to have the CPU shift down to a slower clock speed and the have the hard drive spin down when they aren’t in use.

With the cost of electricity these days, workstation power consumption actually becomes extremely relevant because it’s a perpetual cost:   Every year, this cost is associated with TCO of a workstation’s life. 

The question however arises, "How do I measure Windows Vista’s the power savings?"

Enter "Kill A Watt".
http://www.supermediastore.com/kilwateldet1.html

Kill A Watt is a benchmarking tool that tells you how much power in watts is consumed by a given device.  In this case, it would be a workstation & it’s monitor. 

You can actually see the variation in power consumption if you compare managed Windows XP Professional OS’s versus managed Windows Vista Enterprise OS’s on the same hardware.

So if you’d like to do a simple shootout of how much power Windows Vista can save you, try getting one of these little devices.  They’re generally only about $25-$30.

References for Power Management
Check out these discussions on Power Management in Windows Vista through Group Policy:

• Power GP Part 1:  http://blogs.technet.com/grouppolicy/archive/2006/08/30/452916.aspx
• Power GP Part 2:  http://blogs.technet.com/grouppolicy/archive/2006/09/06/454458.aspx
• "Power Management in Windows Vista" Powerpoint:  
  http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b97017b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/CPA075_WH06.ppt
• Value of Power Mgmt:  http://www.energystar.gov/powermanagement