Computers and computer peripherals consume dramatic amounts of electricity every year, draining your budget and contributing to greenhouse gases.

But for little or no money, you can reduce the number of watts your system and peripherals use, saving cash and limiting the environmental damage.

What’s the easiest way to go green?
Too often, grand concepts like “green computing” are like the weather: everyone talks about it, but nobody does anything. Like it or not, the construction and use of computers still involves hazardous materials and the production of greenhouse gases. Is there anything you can do now without waiting for the perfectly constructed, solar-powered, recyclable computer? Fortunately, the answer is yes. (more…)

computer, computer peripherals, consults, electrical bill, environmental damage, fortunately, greenhouse gases, green computing, hibernation mode, power options, recyclable, solar powered, suspend mode, watts

In a worst case scenario, a piece of malicious code such as a Trojan Horse or a Downloader has infected your machine and is communicating via your Internet connection. Your computer could be a zombie machine in a botnet network, spamming immense quantities of emails and drastically impacting the performance of the operating system. Fortunately, both Windows Vista and Windows XP provide you with the means to monitor your Internet activity.

Netstat is a command line utility designed to allow you a closer view at “protocol statistics and current TCP/IP network connections. The netstat utility displays active TCP connections, ports on which the computer is listening, Ethernet statistics, the IP routing table, IPv4 statistics (for the IP, ICMP, TCP, and UDP protocols), and IPv6 statistics (for the IPv6, ICMPv6, TCP over IPv6, and UDP over IPv6 protocols).” (more…)

ethernet statistics, fortunately, Internet, internet activity, ipv6 statistics, ip routing, netstat, network connections, sysinternal, tcpview, tcp ip, udp protocols, vista, Windows