Too many computers
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Green IT, Blog, hardware on
Gartner has been coming out with some seriously big figures over the last week or so. I mean huge, even by Gartner standards. Take, for example, the little gem revealed in the “Market Trends: Worldwide PC Market Scenarios, 2Q08” report that says some 297 million computers will be shipped worldwide this year. That’s up 12.5 percent on the 264 million that were shipped last year if you believe the Gartner numbers.
The rise being predominantly down to the strength of the mobile market, causing a revision of the 10.9 percent growth that was being touted around by its analysts as recently as March.
“Mobile PC shipments exceeded our expectations in the first quarter of 2008,” said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner. “Mobile PCs continue to have strong momentum and the global economic environment is proving to be less punishing than we expected. Even so, it’s a bit premature to say PC shipments won’t be impacted by a weaker global economy, especially if oil and food prices continue to soar.”
Gartner also says that emerging PC markets will remain a key shipment growth segment, forecast to grow 17.1 percent in 2008 compared with 6.3 percent for mature market shipments. The emerging market mobile PC growth will do even better, 39.4 percent versus 19.1 percent in 2008.
“PC shipments should continue to maintain double-digit growth so long as emerging markets remain strong,” Mr. Shiffler said. “Emerging markets appear less imperiled by the economic slowdowns taking place in the United States and other mature markets than we once thought. However, rising oil and food prices are accelerating inflation in many emerging markets and this could begin to squeeze PC demand in those markets, especially if local policymakers respond by curbing GDP growth to cool inflation. Even so, it is unlikely that emerging market PC growth would slow so much that global PC growth would slip into the mid-single digits.”
But even those numbers pale into insignificance when Gartner rolls out the real big guns in its “Forecast: PC Installed Base, Worldwide, 2004-2012” report which claims that there are no less than a billion PCs installed around the world. Jump ahead to 2014 and Gartner suggest the figure will double to 2 billion.
That’s an awful lot of computers. Trouble is there is an awful lot of churn when it comes to computer hardware. Which means that, again if you put your faith in the Gartner research, some 180 million computers will be replaced in 2008 alone.
However the most troublesome number as far as I am concerned is also one of the smallest: 35 million.
That is the number of computers which will head straight for landfill, no recycling, no environmentally friendly stripping of toxins, just straight into the ground. Call me an old hippie (actually I am an ageing punk, truth be told) but that just seems an awful sad state of affairs…
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Saving the planet? Saving a few quid more like…
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Kyocera Mita Europe has published the results of its latest survey, carried out by the IFAK Institute, which looked at the way in which environmental issues impacted upon the European enterprise from the employee perspective. British companies were pretty clear cut in thinking that they could do better with 89 percent saying so, compared to the European average of just 69 percent.
Us Brits are also leading the way when it comes to understanding the importance of getting the green message across to employees. While only 59 percent of the French companies asked considered this of importance, and 62 percent of the Germans, the British enterprise response was a credible 73 percent.
Overall though, across Europe, employees thought that they were doing a decent job in saving the planet while working through the adoption of green practises of some kind or another: 90 percent to be precise. Interestingly, top of the save the planet pops were switching off equipment at night with 55 percent, followed by using digital documentation on 52 percent and duplex printing and photocopying on 43 percent. Shame on the 9.7 percent who readily admitted to doing absolutely none of the above though.
The enterprise itself is doing its bit, at least that is the message coming across when employees were asked the question. 44.8 percent of European companies recycle used ink and toner carts for example. Methinks the employees are wearing rose tinted spectacles if they truly think that less than 50 percent bothering to recycle carts is ‘doing their bit’ for the planet. It is an appallingly low figure. Indeed, this is borne out by the 77 percent of respondents who thought the business could be doing more in general, and 69 percent when it comes to recycling in particular.
Let us not forget that saving the planet is not, perhaps, the driving force behind environmentally friendly computing practises - that would have to be reducing costs as suggested by 38 percent of those asked about enterprise motives for going green. 21 percent thought it was some kind of politically correct branding exercise designed to boost the image of the company concerned. Only 24.9 percent thought that environmental change was the main influencing factor.
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Fight global warming with local cooling
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Green IT on
An interesting take on environmentally friendly computing hit my desktop today, the LocalCooling.com project from Uniblue Systems, better known for the Windows Task Manager on steroids, WinTasks Pro. LocalCooling.com aims to build a community of people all using the Local Cooling software utility to control the power consumption of their PCs. The idea being that if enough people join in, and the target is a perhaps rather optimistic 100 million, the global computing carbon footprint could be reduced dramatically.
Here’s how the non-commercial project works. You download a small application that automatically optimises your PC power settings to use a more efficient and effective power save mode via an easy to use interface. OK, so the Windows power settings interface isn’t exactly hard to use but Local Cooling takes things a little further in that a screen shows how much power your computer is using, by way of various components such as the display, storage, CPU and graphics card for example, then a simple slider lets you choose how much power you want to save. Better yet, it then shows you exactly how much power you have saved since installing it. An advanced tab lets you fully customise exactly how long before hard drives spin down or the PC shuts down, you can even specify a time before which it should never shut down and instruct it never to if a particular application is running. So, quite a move forward from the basic Windows power control after all.
Uniblue estimate that more than 30 billion kilowatt hours of energy are wasted every year simply through people forgetting to turn off their computers when they leave the office. Not too hard to imagine that this figure is correct, given 660 million computer users globally, consuming millions of kilowatt hours each and every day. Considering that the CO2 emissions from 15 computers are, Uniblue claim, the equivalent in energy terms to the petrol consumption used by a single car, anything that we can do, that you can do, to reduce that consumption has to be a good thing.
Being a community based project, log into the website and you can see the real time updated figures for power savings by LocalCooling users globally, translated into terms such as barrels of oil and trees saved. As I write, just a few hours into the project officially launching and with just 1185 users, LocalCooling reckons to have saved 901.89KWh, equal to 432.91 gallons of oil and 47.8 trees saved.
Oh, and let’s not forget, as a bonus you will be saving money as well as the planet. If your PC is consuming, say, 1KWh of power every four or five hours (not outside the realms of possibility for a high spec PC with peripherals attached) and is left on 24/7, over the course of 3 months you will have consumed the equivalent of a whole barrel of oil. LocalCooling.com reckons this can be extended to a barrel every 6 months if you sign up and power down when not using the computer.
Sounds like a club worth joining to me. Which is why I did…
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