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Barclays screen saver ban delivers £1m power savings
Do you have a screensaver running on your computer? If so perhaps you should replace the bouncing ball, swimming fish or flashing corporate logo with an image showing a wad of cash going up in flames.
That is certainly the view of Paul Baglin, corporate real estate services manager for the wealth management division of Barclays, which recently canned the company's screen saver after discovering it would save the business over £1m a year globally.
"I couldn't believe the savings were accurate," admitted Baglin. "But we checked the figures and with the 30,000 monitors and desktops that we had running the screen saver the calculations were correct. Getting rid of it is saving us over £1m."
Speaking at today's Kyocera Green Card conference on green IT, Baglin admitted that the screen saver featuring the company's corporate logo was "probably pretty badly designed" and actually used more energy than when staff were running applications.
But he observed that it was likely to be a common problem at many firms and it was completely unnecessary to be running screensavers that ate up so much energy and stopped monitors switching to stand by.
"It was a challenge to get rid of the screensaver across the company as it featured the brand," he said. "But it made sense and now we have stopped all screensavers, by blocking people putting replacements on their desktops."
Posted by James Murray on June 12, 2007 | Permalink
