Green IT: Save energy, save money, use IT products in a green way

Environmental protection becomes a hot topic these days, I am quite sure everyone can realize the extreme weather and strange incident happened around the world. Governments and scientists have working on different ways try to maintain a sustainable environment. But in my opinion, the most efficient way to stop environment become worse is to reduce our energy consumption.

In the Green IT series, I will take about some IT related tips that everyone can do to help to save environments. This time, I will focus on how to choose a suitable device.

What we should look at when we are choosing computer

When we are choosing computers, we always look at the following: brands, producer, price, configurations, etc. And In my opinion, we can add some “green factor” to the above criteria.

Brands:

We always love to choose famous brands, but apart from the popularity of the brands, I also suggest choosing brands with better customer services. You may ask how customer services protect environment. The answer is that we can use that device for a longer period which is a big help to the environment. There are toxic substances inside electronic devices, and after we dump it, these toxic chemicals may harm the environment! This lead to another tip: choose high quality devices that will not easily broke or malfunction.

Producer:

I suggest, choosing a local producer as foreign producer means a lot of transportation, more transportation mean more greenhouse gases emission which is very bad to the environment.

Configurations:

Most people like to choose high performance devices, but the truth is, most of time we don’t need to use the highest performance. So when we are choosing computers, we have to know how powerful we need our device to be, if we don’t need to play games, just use the computer to handles word documents and spread sheets, browsing internet, or watching movies, we probably just need a medium high configuration computer. But of course, we have to consider the future needs. Try to find out the balance between your need and future needs.

If you are buying component yourself, choose component with higher energy efficient would be good, for example some 80 plus power supply.

Conclusion

In this article, I have just cover a little factors we can consider when we are choosing a computer, these are just some of the elements we can consider, the main purpose of this article is to inspire everyone to care about our environment. Try to think about what we can do to help saving energy, and try to do more to save the environment.

Please leave me some ideas or comments. We can discuss more on this topic.