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Indeed, it would appear that while hard drives have gotten smaller, faster and more energy-efficient, many other elements of the average desktop PC have become increasingly energy-hungry.

If you look back at the good old Hercules monochrome card or CGA colour display card you won't find any fans or large heat-sinks. That's because these simple devices didn't use a whole lot of power. Mind you, they didn't offer much in the way of graphics either.

And, while advances in technology mean we're now burning fewer watts of power per megabyte than we used to, the amount of RAM in your average PC has rocketed by a factor of a thousand or more.

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Of course the never-ending quest for processing speed has also meant that CPUs are now really sucking the juice and also come with a fan to dissipate the enormous amounts of heat they generate.

As we all know, the heat produced by a PC is bad, for any number of reasons.

Firstly it represents wasted energy -- in a world where we're starting to realise that we only have limited amounts of fossil fuel and where the cost of electricity seems to be going up at an alarming rate.

Secondly, heat means elevated temperatures and this results in a shorter working life for most semi-conductors.

It's rather paradoxical that, at a time when energy is becoming an increasingly more expensive resource, we're building bigger and faster PCs to perform relatively simple tasks such as word processing and accounting.

Yes, you can turn on all the energy-saving options of Windows so that your hard drive will spin-down when not being accessed, your screen will go into saver mode after a period of inactivity, etc -- but this still seems like a complex solution to a simple problem.

So why do PC makers continue to use power-hungry standard processor chips when there are a raft of far more miserly CPUs available, many of which have been designed for the laptop marketplace?

Some of today's faster processors actually burn as much as 100 watts of electricity which, when you multiply it by the number of computers in use every day, represents a *huge* amount of wasted power.

Fortunately the CPU makers are waking up to the market for more efficient chips and Intel has announced that within a few years it plans to ship an ultra-low voltage processor that uses just half a watt of power. Yes, that's right, just 500mW!

Of course I doubt that hardcore gamers will flock to such a device, since there will doubtless be some trade-off in terms of performance but surely it would be great if we were to see these in desktop machines designed for simple office automation tasks.

To complete the low-power package however, we might need to come up with some "conservative" graphics cards too. Ones that don't bother with 3D texture mapping or other "gee whiz" features that won't do a single thing for your average business user but which use just a trickle of power.

And, if we can get a low-power display technology through the doors of the research labs, it may well be that we'll have a new generation of PCs that use no more power than one of those energy saving light bulbs.

Is your PC energy-efficient? Have you added up the total power consumption of your computer equipment? If so, share that figure with other readers or let us know what you've done recently to lighten your load on the grid.

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