I am running on Windows 7 and I have the habit of not turning off my computer at all. This is due to me hosting some services on my pc that have external users.   The question here is, how do I lower CPU usage and power consumption to its minimum yet keep the services working? Things such as screen rendering should not need to run when i am sleeping or not using the computer. How to I tell the PC to turn off Display on the press of a button? Additionally, what else can I do to lower power consumption?
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I watch a lot of movie's on my computer which is connected to my TV. Problem is i built the pc to be a gaming computer and it has the power supply to match (1200w).  Is there a way to set it into a "Low power mode" whilst i am playing a movie to use as little power as possible.  I am running -  Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit VLC for playing movies Connect to my TV via a standard HDMI cable
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As far as I know, today most of the computers are made from semiconductor devices, so the energy consumed all turns into the heat emitted into space.  But I wonder, is it necessary to consume energy to perform computation?   If so, is there a theoretical numerical lower bound of the energy usage ? (I even have no idea about how to measure the amount of "computation") If not, is there a physically-practical Turing-complete model that needs no energy?     edit: Thank @Nathaniel for rapidly answering the question and pointing out it's actually . Also thank @horchler for referring to the  and the related . There are lots of useful information in the comments; thank every one! This whole stuff is really interesting!
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Can my computer components ( Monitor, Motherboard, RAM, HDD, CPU, SMPS) become damaged due to a sudden power flux. It's only needed to shut down Windows properly.  Can I solve both Hardware and Software problems without UPS?
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How do you stop a Windows 10 Desktop waking up from the sleeping/hibernated power state without user intervention?  For lots of users this won't be an issue but, if you sleep in the same room as your PC, then having your machine wake up at 3:30AM to download updates is irritating.
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my former wrong assumption: it drains my notebook battery and I've no shortage of RAM. In Task manager you see ntoskrnl.exe is eating more CPU time than any other process. this feature does not appear to be optional and came 2 days ago with the 1st Win10 Update (Win10Pro in my case).  Edit:  I want to disable it, at least to exclude it as a culprit for my (unproven) assumptions. That process never came to my attention in the last 2 months and in task manager's long name it's called "system memory and compressed memory".
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I want my PC to hibernate when I press shutdown (exactly shutdown button) but I don't know how can I modify something like registry or group policy to achieve my goal. Is there any way to do that?
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Starting yesterday, I have a very odd problem on my Windows 10 desktop-- my CPU is constantly running at 100% (according to Task Manager), and it isn't throttling down. Because of this, it's constantly running at 3.3 GHz and the temperatures are rising to the point where the fans kick in at full force. If I go into the Windows power settings screen and manually change the processor power maximum to 50%, then it's capped at 50% frequency (~1.5 GHz), but it never goes below the maximum possible frequency.  The weird thing is, when I look at the process list, there isn't really anything obvious that's triggering it. None of the processes are abnormal, and though the process CPU percentages do add up to 100%, it doesn't make sense to me that each individual process is taking up as much CPU as Task Manager says it is. Everything seems to be "using" a significantly higher amount of CPU resources than it normally does.  As an attempt to diagnose the problem, I've also tried using Process Explorer. The really weird thing is that Process Explorer shows only 1-2% usage when idle, with the System Idle Process taking up the remaining ~98% as I would expect. Again, nothing looks out of the ordinary in the process list, but the processes are showing the levels of activity I would expect in Process Explorer.  I've already run both Windows Defender and Malware Bytes (a virus was my first guess), but nothing has turned up yet.  This same issue also occurs in Safe Mode, so I'm guessing that it's more along the lines of something to do with Windows itself...  So, to recap:   Windows 10 Desktop Intel 970, 3.3 GHz, 6 cores Task manager and resource monitor graphs shows 100% usage total No individual process is taking up significant resources in the resource monitor list CPU is not throttling down automatically based on the dynamic load, causing high temperatures and the fan to kick in Process Explorer is only showing 1-2% CPU usage   Before I go uninstalling everything, how would I figure out what's causing the issue if nothing weird is showing up in Task Manager or Process Explorer?
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Can anyone explain how Windows effectively limits the CPU?  Last time I tried some tricks to let my laptop not overheat, so I tried limiting the CPU to 70%.   As for my suprise it stopped my laptop from overheating - even when launching CPU intensive applications which caused my laptop to overheat and shut down, didn't overheat my laptop anymore!  I looked at task manager but the "CPU intensive" application still uses ~95% of CPU and the windows task manager shows a total of 100% CPU usage.  I have limited the CPU usage here ("plugged in" option was on 70% [both min and max] when testing the CPU intensive application):    How does Windows do this magic?   I see 100% CPU usage yet my CPU does not overheat. And I do not see any performance differences.  Does Windows limit the CPU speed? Like, if I have a 2.4 GHz processor, on 70% it will only have 1.68 GHz when limited? How is this possible (changing the CPU speed)? I thought you can only underclock when in BIOS?  If not, how does Windows accomplish this if not by changing the speed?    Side question: If it's about the speed, is there a way to set the CPU max state to 200% ?
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I use Windows 10 at work, and for security reasons, I always lock my workstation when I leave the room for any reason.  The problem is that my monitor is a Samsung 4K TV and the lock screen puts it to sleep after only 60 seconds, and after a few more minutes, it goes completely off, requiring me to use the remote control to turn it on again.  I'm OK with using the remote to turn it on in the morning when I come in, but it's annoying to have to use it after a 10-15 minute conversation in another office.
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For the last 1.5 years I've tended to put my laptop in sleep mode rather than turn it off. Recently I started to feel it's not as fast as it was when I bought it, even if I restore a fresh Windows 7 image (I made it 1 week after installing the system for the first time).  Maybe it's just an impression, I'm not sure...   Can it be a result of putting my laptop in sleep mode? What computer parts get worn down over time? Is there software to test if these parts are worn?
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So this is pretty simple: when I press the power button whilst the machine is on, it comes up with a menu (of which one of the options is to shutdown)  However, I just want it to just start shutting down once I press the power button without any further interaction!  How do I accomplish this?
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Is there a Windows standard way to do things such as "start fan", "decrease speed" or the like, from C/C++?  I have a suspicion it might be ACPI, but I am a frail mortal and cannot read that kind of documentation.  Edit: e.g. Windows 7 lets you select in your power plan options such as "passive cooling" (only when things get hot?) vs. "active cooling" (keep the CPU proactively cool?). It seems the OS does have a way to control the fan generically.
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I run distributed computing projects, which typically want to use 100% of the CPU.  How do I limit the CPU usage in terms of temperature instead of percent usage?  Also, what is the maximum safe temperature to keep an Intel i5 running 24/7?  (With no CPU limit FahCore_a4 causes this machine to run at 82 degrees Celsius.)
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I am having a problem with Windows 7. When I boot up, the CPU jumps to 100% execution for about 10-15 minutes. During this time, it is really slow, and if I play any music, the songs play slowly and sound distorted.  I tried to scan my computer with different antivirus programs, I used Spybot, HijackThis, and CCleaner, but I didn’t find anything of note.  I watched the process list in Task Manager and saw that there are two processes that are to blame. There are two copies of svchost.exe, one using ~48% CPU, the second (under the Network Service account) using ~37%. For the first 15 minutes, the CPU runs at about 70-80%, then eventually drops to 30-40%.  I don’t know what to do. I could not find a way to stop the services, and if I try to kill them, sometimes the system crashes.
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In the Windows 7 Power Options, under "PCI Express", I can adjust "Link State Power Management".  The options are:   Off Moderate power savings Maximum power savings   What do these settings do?  Is there any reason to enable it when my laptop is plugged in?
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How would you go about turning you computer after a specified amount of time?   I listen music before I go to sleep and would like to be able to shutdown my computer after a specified amount of time. After ½ an hour say.   It would be cool if you could connect a desktop shortcut to a task in scheduler so you click the shortcut and ½ an hour later it shuts down.
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How can I optimize Ubuntu for minimal energy usage? I use my laptop for development, but also for writing. I have a 9 hour flight coming up and a 6 hour battery life when already using   limited screen brightness no usb devices no networking bumblebee installed and the nvidia card switched off TLP set on powersave   How can I now increase my battery life knowing that I only want to write (using LibreOffice)? I essentially want a very minimal system for a sort of 'writing mode.'   Should I limit my quadcore to one core? Should I disable some services? Here is the list of service --status-all  [ + ]  acpid [ + ]  anacron [ + ]  apache2 [ - ]  apparmor [ ? ]  apport [ + ]  atd [ + ]  avahi-daemon [ ? ]  binfmt-support [ + ]  bluetooth [ - ]  brltty [ + ]  bumblebeed [ + ]  console-font [ + ]  console-setup [ + ]  cron [ + ]  cups [ + ]  cups-browsed [ - ]  dbus [ ? ]  dns-clean [ - ]  elasticsearch [ - ]  fancontrol [ + ]  friendly-recovery [ - ]  grub-common [ ? ]  irqbalance [ - ]  kerneloops [ ? ]  killprocs [ + ]  kmod [ ? ]  lightdm [ - ]  lighttpd [ - ]  lm-sensors [ ? ]  mysql [ ? ]  networking [ + ]  nmbd [ ? ]  ondemand [ - ]  openvpn [ + ]  postgresql [ ? ]  pppd-dns [ + ]  prey-trigger [ - ]  procps [ - ]  pulseaudio [ ? ]  rc.local [ + ]  resolvconf [ + ]  rfkill-restore [ + ]  rfkill-store [ - ]  rsync [ + ]  rsyslog [ + ]  samba [ + ]  saned [ - ]  selfcontrol [ ? ]  sendsigs [ + ]  setvtrgb [ - ]  smartmontools [ + ]  smbd [ ? ]  speech-dispatcher [ - ]  sudo [ - ]  timidity [ ? ]  tlp [ - ]  udev [ ? ]  umountfs [ ? ]  umountnfs.sh [ ? ]  umountroot [ - ]  unattended-upgrades [ - ]  urandom [ + ]  winbind [ - ]  x11-common    Should install a more lightweight desktop environment? Can I do this in a nice and clean way (after all I have my laptop nicely set up and do not want to have to reinstall before 14.04). Should I do something else?    One last thing: I would like to activate or deactivate all these options with one script (which I will run only when working on battery). Please be as kind as to include suggestions on how to do what you suggest.  PS: the info in some of the possible duplicates is dated for 13.10.