Computers can consume a lot of power and thus have a significant impact to your energy bill.

The easiest thing to do is, when you are not using your PC just shutdown it now.   Especially when you leave the office for the night or go to bed at night.  A reason the computer might need to be left on is if there are some backups running over night.  If your computer does need be left running over night, turning off monitors, speakers and other peripherals does help and adds up to saving money on your energy bill.

There are many options in Windows Vista for Power Savings.  To set these options go to Control Panel -> Power Option.  The two easiest things you can set are when to turn off the display and when to put the computer to sleep.  These are items that can be turned off easily.  Think about the amount of time you typically step away from the computer and set accordingly. Microsoft Vista comes with three different 'plans' that make some settings based on general use of computers, balanced, power saver and high performance.  You have the option to create your own custom power plan based on exactly how you use your computer.

 Control Panel -> Power Options

The two easiest things you can set are when to turn off the display and when to put the computer to sleep at a set time.  When you turn the display off the display and computer is still using power, but will be using much less energy than it sitting there running some screen saver that no one is looking at.  Determine which settings work best for your workstation or laptop and set appropriately.

If you like to dig down and really tweak your computers power usage to to 'Change Advanced power settings' on the screen above.

OpenOffice is a application suite that is available as an alternative to Microsoft Office.  It is currently available for Microsoft Windows (95, 98, ME, 2000, Vista), Sun Solaris, Linux, MAC OS X and other operating systems. The OpenOffice.org project is primarily sponsored by Sun Microsystems, other major contributors include Red Hat, IBM and Google. OpenOffice can be downloaded and used entirely for free.

OpenOffice.org mission statement

"To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format"

Open Office includes several modules some of the modules are as follows.

  Writer is a word processor that is similar to Microsoft Word and WordPerfect.  Writer has the ability to write and open documents in different formats including .doc, .docx, RTS and .xhtml.  It has the ability to export documents as .pdfs.

Cal is for spreadsheets that is is similar to Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3.  Cal has the ability to write and open spreadsheets in different formats including CSV, html, DBF, DIF, SLK, ,XLS and more. Also has the ability to write spreadsheets directly in .pdf format.

Impress is a presentation program that is similar to Microsoft Power Point.  Presentations can be exported in different formats including Adobe Flash (.swf), Portable Document Format (.pdf) and Microsoft Power Point (.ppt).

Math is a tool used for creating mathematical formulas similar to Microsoft Equation Editor or MathType.  

 OpenOffice.org