Putting your PC to sleep
by Nick Smith 26th June 2007For years I've had my PC go into a low-energy standby mode after so many minutes of not using it (e.g., 20 minutes) along with screen blanking and hard drives spinning down.
This is set in your 'Control Panel -> Power Options' dialogue box in Windows XP. I have:
Turn off monitor: after 5 mins
Turn off hard disks: after 10 mins
System standby: after 20 mins
And this is great for saving power if you forget to switch your computer off completely, or walk away for a long break/meeting. Your PC will come back out of standby mode in only a few seconds, by just pressing any key.
However, in the 'Advanced' tab, you can configure certain keys to put your PC into standby mode immediately, any time you walk away from the computer. My keyboard has separate 'Power' and 'Sleep' buttons, so I've now started putting the PC to standby as soon as I leave it - even it is only for a 5 minutes coffee break. Should save quite a bit of power.
Update: By using a mains power monitor, I found to my horror that the PC was still using 73W in standby!! 
I went into the BIOS settings (hold down the 'Delete' key when you first switch the machine on) and changed the suspend/power saving option from S1 to S3. It now only uses 4W in standby 
More about this here: [ link ]
Really all PCs should come shipped with S3 by default, and Windows should have power saving switched on.
Read more: Power Management in Windows XP
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