You've undoubtedly seen the mysterious set of joggers hanging over power pole wires at some point in your life (someone I know tried to tell me it means a drug dealer lives in the house opposite...mmmmmm...doubt they are stupid enough to believe the police wouldn't catch on to that).

Perhaps you've seen a skydiver or hot air balloon come dangerously close to hanging in them.

And you would have to be blind to have never seen birds sitting on the wires either. However it wasn't until now I thought this was actually a major problem affecting power supply and really endangering the lives of our avian cohabitants.

Quick blog post tonight....1E are running a webinar on Desktop Power Management on Thursday 19th at 11am Sydney/Melbourne time, with their Senior Consultant Anthony Clendenin.  1E state that turning off PCs will save $40-50k per 1000 PCs per annum and reduce carbon emissions by 240 tonnes.  The 1E software helps enable this.

Alan Burchill contacted me recently and let me know he has developed a really comprehensive blog post titled "How to use Group Policy Preferences to manage Windows Power Plans".  Extract:

"One of the new feature of Group Policy Preferences in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is support for configuring power plans using preferences for Windows Vista and later (see Image 1). You used to be able to control power management in Vista using native policies however the advanced targeting of preferences now enables lot of new scenarios with power savings..."

Read the full post here

Just a real quick one today:  I have posted a short 1:16 minute video targeted more for end-users and general public, on how to configure their Windows Vista machine to Energy Star-recommended power settings.

I'd expect the IT Pro to set their's through group policies so I'll be posting up a video on this in the near future.

In the meantime if your small business, mum or grandma want to know how to do it, point them to this VIDEO.