Rocking Team

Lots of people leave their PCs on overnight. Often, this is for no good reason whatsoever, it’s just out of laziness. But sometimes it’s a conscious decision: if you want your computer to continue receiving updates, or transmit/receive information of any kind during the wee hours of the night, you need to leave it on. But even the lowest power settings generally burn more power than you need to do that minimal amount of computing.

Now, those people can use a system called Somniloquy. Although this device may be hard to spell, it does offer a cool service. Most computers have four levels of power consumption – regular use, standby, sleep/hibernate mode and completely shut down. A lot of people, including myself, prefer to hibernate their PCs rather than shut them off, because it allows them to start up again more quickly. With Somniloquy, you can hibernate your PC and still have it communicate with other PCs. Check out more details on Phys.org.

Personal computers may soon save large amounts of energy by “sleep talking.” Computer scientists at UC San Diego and Microsoft Research have created a plug-and-play hardware prototype for personal computers that induces a new energy saving state known as “sleep talking.” Normally PCs can be in either awake mode—where they consume power even if they are not being used, or in a low power sleep mode—where they save substantial power but are essentially inactive and unresponsive to network traffic. The new sleep talking state provides much of the energy savings of sleep mode and some of the network-and-Internet-connected convenience of awake mode.