Verdiem Edison PC Software

Review of Verdiem Edison PC Software - http://www.verdiem.com/edison/
Verdict: basic, but useful if your PC’s power management software isn’t up to scratch

I learnt about the Verdiem Edison software through a Microsoft newsletter and thought I should check it out. It’s free to download and getting it downloaded, installed and up-and-running was very straightforward. It’s clearly a loss-leader that serves as a driver for their corporate network software, but it’s not too in-your-face and I’d kind of expected that to be the case.

I’ve had it installed for about three weeks now and it has been unobtrusive, stable and hasn’t caused me any problems. It sits in your system tray so it’s quick and easy to open the program and adjust your settings.

The interface is simple, with a sliding scale allowing you to save more or less energy, and to schedule different power management policies for work and non-work time (which you can schedule to suit your day). You can customise the options if the sliding scale presets don’t suit you.

The software will turn off your display, your hard drive and suspend your computer according to the settings you choose and will tell you the Estimate Annual Savings in terms of energy, money (in US dollars unfortunately for us UK citizens) and CO2. The financial savings are calculated on an electricity cost that you can enter, so I guess you could just enter the cost per kWh in pence and pretend the dollar symbol is a pound sterling symbol?

When I looked at how these are calculated, it’s really all based on averages – apparently the US EPA have produced a report showing that enabling power management on a computer can save 410kWh per year, which equates to $36.50 (~ £20), or about 500 pounds (~ 250 Kg) of CO2. For a free bit of software, that’s worthwhile if your computer doesn’t have built-in power management software or it’s not user-friendly enough to enable you to manage your PC’s power consumption effectively.

I’ve got a new PC, a Lenovo ThinkPad, and the power management software that comes with that is advanced and user-friendly enough that I’m confident in using it. I’m not convinced how much energy Edison is going to save me.

To bring this software up to the quality it could be, I’d like to see far more actual information and far less estimates based on averages. How many times has Edison kicked in to spin down my hard drive? How much energy has it actually saved me? Some kind of activity vs energy consumption log would give me far more faith that it’s worth keeping on my computer.

For now, I think I’ve got power management covered, so I’m going to uninstall Edison, save my processor a few cycles and save my energy that way. I’ll keep an eye out for future versions and try to review some of the other software solutions out there in the meantime.

Some alternative downloads include:

**For home**

Carbon Control Software Home Edition - http://ccspress.blogspot.com/2008/08/car​bon-control-software-home-edition.html

LocalCooling - http://www.localcooling.com/

**For networks**

Carbon Control Software – http://carboncontrolsoftware.com/

CarbonAudit – http://www.livinglifegreen.co.uk

Loca​lCooling for networks- http://www.localcooling.com/info/network

Added By:David Lockie