HP promotes PC switch-off with Power To Change campaign

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 03 June 2009 08:04

IT Industry - Strategy

I don't believe Power To Change is as energy-efficient as it could be.

The widget is implemented using Adobe Air, and when idle consumes around 5 percent of one of my system's cores.

Right now, only Safari (with multiple windows and tabs open, and some of them containing Flash content) burns more cycles when I leave the system to idle.

And HP's Power To Change microsite is Flash-heavy, which means more CPU cycles and more bits to be pushed across the Internet. We're talking megabytes of data - just the annoying soundtrack is 564K.

All this means more work for the PC used to visit the site, more work for HP's servers, and more work for all the routers and other devices in between.

I don't doubt that the program will show a useful positive saving, but wouldn't it be even bigger if a little more thought had been applied?

Or do you reckon that a flashy Flash site will attract more participants than a more lightweight HTML-only version would, and that the result will be a net saving?