Holger's Blog

Ever wondered what the Energy Star label is good for? Ever wondered why it mostly pops up on things like printers and monitors? But how about your personal computer or your laptop?

If you want to find out, consider reading Measuring Power Consumption in the Light of EnergyStar. It contains a detailed guide about how to test your laptop for Energy Star compliance. At SUSE's Mobile Devices Team, we're currently building up a database of all different kind of laptop computers regarding their Energy Star compliance and power consumption. Wanna help? Follow the above mentioned guide and send your results to me (hmacht a t suse d o t de). All results will help us to drive development efforts in this area and will help to identify possible power consumption regressions in upcoming releases. However, to make this possible, the first thing we need is a base collection of laptop results to compare against.

To prevent questions about publishing the results, no, I won't do that. I do not want to compromise any kind of manufacturer in public. They will notice for themselves as soon as there pop up more laptops running Linux having a shiny blue Energy Star label printed on the case or packing ;-)

Like the homonymous title of this post, I gave a talk at this year's FOSDEM at Brussels on Energy Star. It focuses on the requirements for laptop computers, and about how anyone can test his laptop for Energy Star compliance.

If you're too lazy to read through the slides, which should be quite self-explanatory, wait for the video showing me in action. The videos of all FOSDEM talks given by openSUSE community people should be up at the openSUSE FOSDEM page soon. Stay tuned.

Interested in power consumption measurements in general? Consider having a look at the PowerMeasurements openSUSE wiki page. This is, and will be pushed to become the central point for collecting information, hints or tips and tricks about this topic.