You want to save electricity but the question remains, do I save more electricity keeping my computer on or turning it off at night? Well, it depends. On a recent article and study by Microsoft’s Monty Enbysk, the answer lies in counting watts. Putting the computer into sleep mode reduces your wattage use to a mere 7.3 watts which means lots of energy savings. By using sleep or hibernate, it can also equate to time savings of just waiting for about 20-30 seconds to wake the computer up to where it is ready to serve you again. Compare that to the 2-5 minute reboot time of a fully off computer. The one thing we must still remember is that even if the computer’s fully off, the power supply of the computer still draws energy for LAN functions which is about 2.3 watts…this same amount of wattage is true for hibernate as well. If you decided to yank the plug, then yes, the computer is truly off…no more power drain.

So, briefly a quick recap:

Sleep (with Monitor on) = 7.3 watts
Sleep (with Monitor off) = 3.1 watts
Hibernate = 2.3 watts
Off (plugged in) = 2.3 watts
Off (unplugged) = 0 watts

For a more detailed read as well as more interesting facts on computer energy savings, visit Microsoft’s website.

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