FAQS! FACTS! FAX!  538 (07/11/06)

Q. In the light of the current debate over climate change and energy conservation, can you advise how much power a home PC consumes if left on all day? Does switching the PC on and off have any effect?

Brian Parratt, via email

A. This is one of those how-long-is-a-piece-of-string questions but if we make a few basic assumptions we can come up with some ballpark figures.

A typical desktop PC has a 300 to 350 watt power supply but this is its rating, not actual power usage, which is likely to be a lot less, let’s say 200 watts for the sake of argument. CRT monitors consume around 70 to 100 watts depending on size and design but LCD monitors use roughly one third as much, 20 to 30 watts, say. We’ll also assume you are a very busy person and leave your machine switched machine on for up to 10 hours a day. Finally we’ll put the cost of electricity at 10 pence per kilowatt-hour, which is a little above the UK average.

So now we are ready to do some sums and a PC with CRT monitor used for 300 hours a month will costs you £8.40 to run or roughly £100 per year. Switching to an LCD monitor reduces the monthly bill to £6.90 or £83 a year. I must stress these are very approximate, worst case numbers and enabling your PC’s power saving facilities could easily reduce those costs by 40 percent or more. Also, if you haven’t already done so, switch to an LCD monitor, apart from anything else they take up less room and have less of an impact on the environment at the end of their working lives.

Switching the PC on and off more than is necessary is not a good idea and it can reduce the life of some components due to ‘thermal shock’ and transients or ‘spikes’ in the power supply.  

Q. I want to put all of my holiday photographs on a DVD to produce a slideshow, hopefully with background music and simple transitions, in order that they can be played on a normal DVD player rather than a computer.

I have tried a couple of programs, which work OK as a computer slide show, but do not produce a video DVD. Can you recommend a suitable program? I seem to remember reading about slide shows in one of your Boot Camp or F!F!F! columns during the past year, but have been unable to find the reference.

Brian J. Edwards

A. I have tried a number of freeware and shareware DVD authoring programs and the results have tended to be disappointing; this is one application where it is worth paying for decent performance. I think your best bet is Roxio Easy Media Creator. Version 9 of this suite of programs does absolutely everything, including editing your images converting them into DVD format, adding special effects and transitions, creating a soundtrack and burning a DVD or even a Blu-Ray disc. It does much else besides so it should get plenty of use and if you shop around you can find it selling on the web for less than £43. We last looked at digital imaging, including copying pictures to disc in Boot Camps 395 to 400 and you will find them in the Archive.

Q. I am planning to build a DT Mk II ‘Vista Ready PC’, using the motherboard that you have recommended (ASRock 775i945GZ), which has a built-in 128Mb graphics adaptor. However, I already own a spare 128Mb ATI Radeon graphics card, which has never been used. Would there be any point in installing it? If I did fit it I assume the computer’s video memory wouldn’t be doubled (i.e.256Mb).

Guy Robinson, via email

A. You are right about graphics memory not being cumulative and since the motherboard’s integrated graphics adaptor has similar capabilities to your ATI card there would be little or no point installing it. It might come in handy if you wanted to set up a dual monitor display (see Boot Camp 412), though, you would still need to purchase a second graphics card since you can’t use built-in graphics adaptors in this configuration.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop you using a motherboard without integrated graphics and I think you will find that the ASRock 775 Dual-VSTA is a likely candidate for this project, though I hasten to add that I haven’t tried it.

Q. Would it be possible to use a USB memory device to hold a different operating system (e.g. UNIX or Linux)? If so, what does one need to do to be able to execute programs on such a system. I would be interested to know if any one has done this, and if not, why not, since it would seem to be a way of obtaining a kind of mini virtual machine.

J. M. James

A. There are plenty of Linux distributions that are small enough to fit on a pen drive and you will find a good selection of them at Pendrivelinux.com. My own favourite is Knoppix, and this was the subject of a Boot Camp article last year (Boot Camp 403) where we showed how to create a bootable CD, which can be used for troubleshooting or retrieving files from a terminally sick Windows PC.

Knoppix fits comfortably on a 1Gb flash drive, it has an easy to use Windows-style desktop interface and it includes a suite of Office programs, so you can open, edit and save documents images and so on. The only point to watch out for is that not all PCs are able to boot from a USB device, it is a fairly recent innovation and even some new PCs do not support the facility.

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© R. Maybury 2006, 3110