Local Cooling - Fight Global Warming Right From Your Desktop - For FREE - Review

I found this website lurking unnoticed on the Internet purely by chance. I was actually looking for statistics concerning power consumption usage for people who leave on their systems 24/7 without employing any power savings options, such as turning off the monitor, or hard disk or just turning the whole computer off when they go to bed.

Instead what I found was a website that is offering free software that the author states will do the following:

“LocalCooling is a 100% Free power management tool from Uniblue Labs that allows users to optimize their energy savings in minutes and as a result reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions.

Download the 100% Free LocalCooling Application and it automatically optimizes your PC’s power consumption by using a more effective power save mode. You will be able to see your savings in real-time translated to more evironmental terms such as how many trees and gallons of oil you have saved.”

So I downloaded the Local Cooling software which is about 2.5 MB in size, and after creating a restore point, I installed it on my test machine running Windows XP SP2. Note: This software only works with XP.

Well, this is kind of a unique software. Not only does it allow you to tweak your power settings more efficiently using custom controls, or 3 choices of low, medium, high done automatically, but the GUI is very pleasing to the eye. And there is a feature tab called My Power which actually listed the parts of my PC that were using juice PLUS how much each part was using and a grand total. The software read my hardware perfectly. Which that in itself was amazing, since some softwares I have used were not even close.

Testing: I set the system to turn off my monitor after 5 minutes, hard disk after 15 minutes and to hibernate after 30 minutes. Guess what? After 5 minutes I heard there or four chirping sounds from the PC and nothing happened. Monitor still remained on. However, 5 minutes later, chirping again and the monitor turned off. And 15 minutes later hard disk spun down, and within 30 minutes the system hibernated. So it did work.
The test machine I am using is a dual boot Windows XP and Vista. And on the Vista side, the power scheme works perfectly. Vista has a great built in power saving mode which actually completely powers down my system after 30 minutes, and with just a touch of the mouse or keyboard, immediately kicks the system into gear. Nice, very nice.
So overall the software program worked OK. It is beta [testing] so some bugs are to be expected. It offers more options than the standard power savings built into XP, and it sure is pretty.

Local cooling software can be found here for download.

PS Your mobo must support power saving features for this to work.

Tags: free, software, global warming