4sysops - FREE: Wizmo – Control power saving functions in scripts

There is silence about Green IT lately. I suppose that the economic crisis hysteria is keeping CIOs busy on stuff like what project could be cut next. However, reducing power costs is probably the only way that really makes sense when it comes to cutting costs in IT. Considering that the majority of organizations spend most of their power costs for desktop computers, it is the first place they should be looking, in order to reduce power consumption.

The main reason for the higher power consumption on desktops is that users tend to let their computers run 24 hours a day. I only became aware of this fact when someone at Microsoft had the brilliant idea of enforcing reboots after system updates. I think that many don’t feel bad about letting their computer run all the time because they rely on Windows’ power management features. However, there are also many users who disable power management (if you allow it) because some of its features can make a computer unstable and because it usually becomes active at the very moment that you want to continue working.

The idea behind Wizmo is to let users decide for themselves when they want to save power. This 38KB stand-alone tool enables you to control the most important power saving features. As it is a command line tool, you can create shortcuts on user desktops, which will allow the user to turn on certain power management features with just a mouse click.

The reason why I added Wizmo to the 4sysops list of free admin tools is because you can also use it to put computers in hibernate or standby mode after you run certain maintenance scripts, at times when users are not at work.

Wizmo has quite a few command line options. I just copied the most interesting ones: