Currently, most of us leave our office desktops running through out the night. We lock our screens and walk away. The power plug for the monitor is likely on a power-saving mode, the monitor turns off after a while.
One of the really simple things we can do is to put the computer to sleep at night and wake up in the morning and have our computers turned off all weekends.
It is really simple to do this. It takes less than 5 minutes to set this up, so please read on.
1. The first step is to create two batch files
A. "hibernateme.bat" should contain one line:
%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Hibernate
B. "wakemeup.bat" can just be an empty text file.
You can use "notepad" to create the above two files.
2. Windows has a notion of "Scheduled Tasks". You can access this using:
Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Scheduled Tasks
Click on "Add Scheduled Task". When it asks you which program you would like to run as a scheduled task, choose "hibernateme.bat". You can then choose a schedule for it. Assume that you want it to run 8:00pm every day. Your computer will now automatically shutdown at 8pm every day.
3. Click on "Add Scheduled Task" again. When it asks you which program you would like to run as a scheduled task, choose "wakemeup.bat". You can then choose a schedule for it. Choose to run it every weekday at 9:00am. Just before you click "Finish", there is a checkbox that asks "Open Advanced Properties for this task when I click Finish". Click on that and go to the "Settings" tab. In "Power Management" section check "Wake the computer to run this task" and hit OK.
*** Now your computer will sleep every night at 8pm and wake up at 9am on weekdays. You will save a lot of power and make the planet green. ***
You will see no interruptions since the computer is always on when you walk into work and it turns off automatically after you leave work.
Save Power - Save Earth!
Cheers!
