BigFix Power Management
Overview
Stanford University encourages users who have installed BigFix on their Windows computers to participate in the Stanford Power Management program. The program helps you and the University reduce your carbon footprint and save electricity.
In many cases, schools and departments have adopted Power Management so, if you have BigFix on your computer, you are part of the program. To see if your computer is already participating, go to your power management settings. If "Stanford Green" is an available Power Scheme, you are already in the program. See your local IT administrator if you have any questions or want to change your settings.
If you are not automatically in the program, you can still participate. After installing BigFix, download the Stanford Power Management Tool. The Tool lets you choose the desired sustainability level for your computer: super green, green, yellow, or red. Each level corresponds to a power management setting:
- Super Green - monitor turns off after 10 minutes of inactivity and computer goes into standby mode after 30 minutes
- Green - monitor turns off after 15 minutes of inactivity
- Yellow - monitor turns off after 30 minutes of inactivity
- Red - no power management—keep the computer and monitor on all the time
- Custom - choose your own power management settings
These sustainability preferences are stored locally on your computer so you can change them at anytime by re-running the Stanford Power Management Tool.
One big advantage of BigFix Power Management is that BigFix compares your sustainability preferences to your computer's power management settings every 24 hours and makes sure they are in sync. That means if you turn your power management settings to ‘Always On’ when you are giving a presentation, and you forget set them back, Big Fix will do it for you.
There are many reasons to participate in this program, including:
- Annual cost savings—we estimate that using BigFix Power Management can save up to $17 per computer per year. With 40,000 computers on campus, that’s $680,000 in annual savings that goes back to the schools and departments.
- Reduced carbon emissions—this represents approximately 4 million pounds of CO2 being kept from entering the atmosphere, or the equivalent of taking 350 cars off the road for a year.
For faculty and staff participants
If your department has chosen to deploy BigFix Power Management centrally, then your local BigFix console operator (usually your local network administrator) will update your power management settings. Contact your local IT staff if you have questions or want to adjust your power management settings.
If your department is not participating, you can still opt to participate on your own by downloading and running the Stanford Power Management Tool. Alternately, you may want to convince your console operator to have the department participate—BigFix is free to the Stanford Community. Every little bit counts!
For student participants
Residential Computing has decided to allow students to independently decide if they want to participate in this effort to help reduce the energy usage and carbon emissions. Participating is simple—just download and run the Stanford Power Management Tool and select your preferred power management settings. If you don’t already have BigFix installed, you will need to install it before running the Stanford Power Management Tool.
Turning off your power management settings
If you need to, you can change your power management settings for the day, but it will revert to your BigFix Power Management settings overnight. To adjust your settings for the day, see Don't Have BigFix, below, to select an alternate power scheme for the day.
If you want to end your participation in the program, rerun the Stanford Power Management Tool and select None from the list of options. This will take you out of the program.
Don't have BigFix?
Click here to download the BigFix Client for Windows.
If you don't want to install BigFix but you still want to help save electricity and reduce your carbon footprint, you can manually adjust your power settings.
- In Windows XP, right-click on your desktop. Go to the Screen Saver tab and click the Power button to set up a power scheme that turns off your monitor after a short period of inactivity.
- In Windows Vista, right-click on your desktop and click Personalize Click Screen Saver and change your power settings to turn off your monitor after a short period of inactivity.
By doing this manually, you will need to check your power setting periodically to make sure it's what you want it to be. Also, you won't be counted in Stanford's reports on energy savings via desktop power management.
