GreenITStrategy.com

For consumers, Verdiem announced Wednesday last week they were releasing a free tool for power management on Windows XP and Vista called "Edison".  Although Windows Vista's power savings settings are on by default, Windows XP's settings aren't, so a tool like this helps configure these settings in an easy graphical interface for the home user.  Additionally the tool allows for scheduling of power management and provides estimated savings reports, which is something not built in to either Vista or XP.

NYTimes have reported on the release, quoting Kevin Klustner from Verdium: "Household electricity bills could also be trimmed by $20 to $95 a year for each PC, depending on local power costs and the kind of PCs in use."

I installed the software on my home PC, which is running Windows Vista Ultimate.  It was a 28mb download for version 1.0.3166.0 and it was a 'follow the bouncing balls' type install (easy).  My firewall prompted me a couple of times advising the program wanted to access the Internet so gave it temporary access and then followed these steps to configure it:

Step 3 - Then wait for the activation link to be sent to your email address - click on the link and you'll be activated via the web.

So all up pretty easy to setup and targeted at non-IT consumers - I would definitely only recommend it for a home computer, not corporate computers.  The free software can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/environment/campaign_Edison.aspx

For the enterprise, Verdiem has developed corporate power saving software called Surveyor, which can be used to configure things like graceful application shutdown and saving open documents, and configuring different power settings for different groups of people like laptop users.  They have an associated plugin to System Center called Surveyor Wake Up for SMS which helps ease patching suspended computers, even without WoL functionality.