8 Tips To Reduce Power Consumption of LCD Monitor

As it is rightly said that Power saved is power earned. That is exactly what the situation is in our country, where electrical power is not available in sufficient quantity. We all need to do our bit to reduce individual power consumption, thereby making sure that everyone in this country gets sufficient amount of electricity. Since most of us use the computer on a regular basis, this is where we can start saving power. We are not going to tell you to simply shut it down and save power, but we are going to tell you simple measures which will really help you in conserving electricity and do your bit.

Here are some tips to take  care of,while using your computer.
1. Switch off the PC and its peripherals when not in use:
There are times when you don't need the PC to remain switched on, such as when you go to dine or have a bath, so there is no need to keep it running at that time. Switch it off until you return. If you need it in the same state as when you left it, then you can make it hibernate instead of shutting down. It is always better to switch off the PC from the mains, rather than depending on the soft power switch, because even when it is in the sleep mode, the PC does consume some electricity.
2. Remove unnecessary peripherals:
Many people also have peripherals such as printers and MFDs, which are not used very frequently. Such devices consume a lot of electricity, especially laser devices.So you must disconnect them when not in use.
3. Remove unnecessary components from the PC:
If your PC has expansion cards plugged into expansion slots, you can check it out whether they are really needed. For example,  if the last time you gamed was several weeks ago then you can remove out your power hungry graphics card. You may also want to remove other adapters such as video capture card, TV tuner card, etc which you use very rarely. Each of these cards consumes power even in the idle state.You can also remove unnecessary fans, which may not really be providing any real cooling to the PC.
4. Power management
Most computer BIOS support power management features to help you reduce power consumption of the PC. You can make changes in the settings such as the idle time after which hard drives should power down, the standby mode of the monitor, etc. Windows allows you to choose preset power plans for further control over power consumption. You can also choose Power Saver plan to minimize the power consumption.You can access the Power Options through the Control Panel inside Hardware and Sound. Laptop users can also make use of extra power management settings regarding the laptop display and the graphics card, which is normally not available in a desktop PC.
5. Avoid using screensavers
When your PC is idle for few minutes, you can switch off the monitor to save power. Disable any screensavers, especially graphics enables ones, which can actually consume more power than while you work on your computer.
6. Remove unnecessary background applications:
Background applications which constantly thrash hard drives are the most power consuming in your computer. While it is always a good thing not to install too many background applications because they can negatively affect system performance, the same applies even as far as power consumption of the PC is concerned. Uninstall any background application which constantly keeps on unnecessarily accessing your hard drive and prevents it from entering a low power mode.
7. Get an LED technology monitor:
If you are planning to purchase a new monitor, you can can go for an LED backlit monitor instead of the traditional LCD and the CRT. LED backlit monitors have been consistently observed to consume around half the power consumed by an LCD monitor of the same size in some tests. The price difference between LCD and LED backlit monitors is rapidly reducing and it makes LED a better choice.
8. Monitor your PC power consumption with the help of a power meter:
Get a power meter (if you can) , to monitor your PC power consumption. This is possibly the best way to know exactly how much power your PC is consuming. Alternatively, you can use third-party tools such as Everest although we prefer the hardware power meter.
We think these tips should help you reduce your PC power consumption.If you would like to share your power saving tips, please use the comments section below and we will update this article with your helpful tips.