As the price of energy rises, computers have been getting a bad rap when it comes to greedily slurping electricity. Gobbling energy is especially true when it comes to server farms-agglomerations of sometimes thousands of computers linked together to perform Herculean tasks such as powering search applications such as Google.

These computers banks have been the focus of energy-saving schemes for some time now. However, until recently, the billion or so desktop and laptop computers that populate individual homes around the world haven't received the same scrutiny. Sure, Microsoft has a built-in screen saver but even when it's on, energy savings are minimal at best - a computer will still draw between 100 watts and 250 watts.

According to Verdiem, a venture capital-funded company that builds energy saving software for corporations and home use, a typical PC consumes nearly 600 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity annually. Verdiem says its software can reduce that energy consumption by an average of 200 kWh per PC annually. This typically represents a 3-6 percent annual reduction in electricity consumption, saving an average of $20-$60 per PC annually.

If you translate these numbers to a home PC's energy consumption, figure that a desktop or laptop eats up to 10 percent of a home's energy bill and may produce as much carbon dioxide as a family car. That's where Edison, Verdiem's new home PC energy saving software, program comes in.

You can download Edison free from www.verdiem.com. I tried it on my desktop computer at home and it worked quite well.

After setting up a control panel and telling the machine when you want to power down the hard drive, turn off the display and suspend the computer's use, Edison will know what to do.

Thus, after 15 minutes (or whatever parameters you set) it will shift gears and put your PC in a state of suspended animation, which decreases its energy use down to about 5 percent of normal use.

So let's say you've taken a coffee break and you want to get back to work. You then hit your on/switch. Instead of booting up Windows, Edison will take you back to where you left off.

If you're interested in research about power management for your company, be sure and check out Climate Savers (www.climatesaverscomputing.org) a nonprofit organization that has a goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from computers by 54 million tons by 2010. Its Web site has some great links to more tools. For example you can download a calculator developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or one from a company called IE that will determine the cost and CO2 savings from using computer power management. (You can download Edison from this site as well).

I like Edison's technology because you can really tweak the settings to be incredibly frugal. This works better than my usual method - walking around my office and shutting down computers that have been left on!