Still As Life

Well this is interesting, I just read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about energy ratings for computers. There have been a lot of things going on as far as energy conservation and greenhouse emissions goes lately around here. First there was the introduction of the star rating system for plasma and LCD tv's because of the (in my opinion) unfounded argument that they both use significantly more power than CRT's. Now this is fine really, except that I don't agree with much of what I read, but that's for another time.

Now though there is talk of a rating system for computers themselves, from 1 to 5 stars, similar to the system used on white goods like freezers and refrigerators. The article which can be found on the Sydney Morning Herald website from earlier today goes into findings and so on, and sure, I can see why greenhouse emissions need to be reduced and energy needs to be conserved, but as was pointed out in the article, "...most big-brand computer and component makers are already likely to be complying, as they must meet the stricter European laws to ensure global sales." So in this regards, the 24 million or so computers in Australia will be predominately from these big brand manufacturers. Optima, Dell, IBM, HP, Apple and the big brand laptops like Sony, Asus, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Apple and so on. So this means it will most affect the smaller computer stores that put together computers themselves.

These smaller companies are using your everyday components that you find on the shelf and many are not put together with minimum power consumption in mind. Many of the smaller computer store's I have been involved with don't even have the equipment to check the power consumption of a computer.

So any computer that doesn't meet the minimum standard will become illegal to sell. Currently it is being considered for implementation by 2009, so thats plenty of time for these smaller companies to sort out things like this, but I expect it will increase the cost of computers through the small stores and thus affect their sales and income.

This then raises another question for me, unless individual parts are made illegal to purchase, there is no way to police the power consumption of all the computers being produced. While it's not the main computer source, there is a large market of people who build their own computers and computer's for others at no charge. These people aren't going to be checking power consumption, and I don't see any way that this can even be checked.

Aside from making individual parts illegal, which I expect would be a very bad move for the government, the only way I can see for this to work is to put pressure on the component manufacturers to make each individual part meet power requirements, presumably also using a similar system. Of course, this is not unreasonable, but it is going to be quite difficult and a lot of work to implement. To make this worse, the configuration of a computer is near limitless, even in computers from a manufacturer like Dell, anyone can add something else without much difficulty. The only computer market that is even remotely controlled in this regard is the laptop market.

I mean, the chances of there being multiple computers setup exactly the same as my desktop are quite low. I know one person with the same motherboard and CPU as me, and a similar video card, but thats about it, and even in that regard, my motherboard is slightly different. Of course theres far more to it than that.

Power supply: Antec TrueBlue 480w
Motherboard: Asus A8N-E
CPU: Athlon 64 3500+ 939
RAM: 2x 512mb Kingmax DDR400
Video card: HIS Radeon X800 GTO 256mb, 256bit
Optical drive: LiteOn CDRW/DVD Combo Drive
Optical drive 2: Pioneer DVR-109 DVDRW
Wireless: Belkin 802.llg PCI wireless card
Additional HD Controller: Promise SATA1510 TX Series
Hard drive 1: Seagate 120gb PATA
Hard drive 2: Samsung 30gb PATA
Hard drive 3: Western Digital 80gb PATA
Hard drive 4: Seagate 200gb SATA
Hard drive 5: Seagate 400gb SATA
Hard drive 6 & 7 in RAID 0: 2x Seagate 320gb SATA
2x 120mm fans
2x 80mm fans

Sure, I don't doubt there is any number of combinations of my hardware in Australia, but the number of combinations is huge, to control this will be a massive undertaking, and as I see it, any attempt to remove the control I have over the hardware in my computer in this regard is an attempt at my freedom as this is something I love being able to do exactly what I want with, when money permits of course, which it hasn't for a while now as much of the hardware would show.

I think this is a very extreme measure and doubt it would come to that but I suppose with some of the inaccurate "proof" I've seen for power consumption for the plasma's and LCD's (for another article), I expect there could be just as much of this around for cutting back computer power consumption, so I suppose one can only hope it doesn't get too bad.

Labels: hardware, politics, rants, technology