FCO leaves 10,000 PCs on overnight
By Miya Knights,
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has revealed it leaves some 10,000 PCs on in offices around the world overnight.
The figure was revealed in a written answer to a parliamentary question posed by shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth.
But the value of power consumed by leaving the PCs on was unknown because of variable international energy prices, according to the answer given by Meg Munn, Foreign and Commonwealth Office parliamentary under-secretary.
The practice has been going on five years now. Power consumption tests based on the range of personal computers then in use suggested an average of 80 watts for each personal computer, assuming each was idle 14 hours per day. This amounts to four million kilowatts per hour every year or the equivalent of the power needed in more than 300 homes each year.
“It has been our assessment that the risk of lost productivity and the risk to national security that this policy avoids outweighed its cost,” added Munn.
But the response added that the FCO is taking steps to address IT power requirements having installed 3,500 new PCs in offices in the UK.
Under current plans, all 12,000 machines worldwide should have been replaced by 2009. In addition to this, it would apply global policies to ensure a reduction in power consumption, it said.
Earlier this year, the Office of Government Commerce launched a campaign to reduce the amount of energy used by the total government IT estate, and predicted savings of over £10 million a year if departments turned off computers each night.
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Why
How is it a risk to national security to switch off a desktop PC? I would have thought it would have been safer to power them down.
By craignpt on Tuesday Sep 30
what is the point of TV campaigns to switch off standby domestic equipment
UK business continue to run PCs over night as they claim that is when updates, including security patches are installed. The UK Foreign Office are wasting 4,088,000 kilowatt hours of electricity every year on this one activity and that assumes the monitor is switched off, if not you can add another one million kilowatt hours to that.
Many the updates require the computer to be rebooted. If this was done during the working day it would interfere with the normal use of the computer while it closes down and reboots.
This is more nonsense from computer centres. They ought to control and pre-test when updates are rolled out. It can be installed during the working day and updates affected when the computer is next switched on. Doing this once per month is sufficient and would delay work by only a couple of minutes, hardly any longer than the time most computer users take to get their first drink of the morning, shortly after arriving.
The fact that most computers run Microsoft software which requires to have up to 50 security patches each month ought to be of higher concern. Licence free software based upon Linux have few problems, proving that it is possible to write more secure operating systems. Microsoft have had the opportunity to drop legacy problems and Vista is not any more secure except in preventing the user from doing basic operations and from running older programmes and hardware.
By limyau on Wednesday Oct 1