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Not only can going green save you money, but it's a great way to give something back to your country. Our country is at war; young American men and women are fighting and dying every day in Iraq. Not wanting to make this a political position piece, I will go so far as to state that the war in Iraq has something to do with oil. And what is oil? It is energy. Every business needs energy to run, to turn on the lights, run manufacturing machinery, and keep PCs running. It is not only our civic responsibility to use our PCs' power saving features to conserve energy, but it could save lives.

A study by the EPA's Energy Star program of General Electric conducted in 2001, showed that the impact of GE employing the power-management functionality of Windows XP and Windows 2000 across 75,000 PCs, setting monitors to shut down after 15 minutes, the PC itself after 30 minutes, and moving into a full “hibernate” mode after three hours yielded a result of saving $2.5 million per year in energy. The EPA estimates it was enough to power 23,000 homes each year. The reduction in carbon emissions associated with that energy was estimated at 20,000 tons — the equivalent of planting 5,600 trees.