noel alanguilan

it started about a couple of months ago. my electricity bill went down by almost a thousand pesos per month. that is pretty big. you can buy lots of stuff with 1k. and the only thing that i did was stop using my desktop computer. seriously.

for the record, my desktop is an athlon xp 2 ghz (slightly overclocked) with three hard drives (1 is scsi), a cdr/rw, a cdr, six fans plus two for the power supply, three expansion cards and a 17″ crt (read as power hogging) monitor. it seems that this setup can really pull some decent current.

these days, i’m working off a pentium m 1.6ghz laptop with a 15″ screen running on linux. i can still do my work thing (with the exception of my games) at essentially the same pace while drawing less power — 1k pesos less.

this got me thinking. considering the rising prices of fuel and electricity and the growing availability of smaller, less power-hungry (but faster) computers, it would be beneficial to get a smaller, energy-efficient computer. better if one gets a laptop so you can add mobility to the list of pluses. and of course, there’s that “wow” factor of possessing a laptop.

although the prices of reasonable laptops has gone down, they are still up there compared to the currently available desktops but not by much. the cheapest laptop in rising sun is the msi vr320-p2 (intel dual core 1.8ghz, 2 gig ram, 80 gig hd, 13.3″ lcd) at almost 30k pesos and a pc package with the equivalent configuration would run to about 25k pesos.

do the numbers and then add in the cost of running the thing (electricity) and you’ll find that getting an energy-efficient computer or a laptop is actually cheaper in the medium to long term.

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