by : admin Green Computing

Monitor Power Consumption – CRT vs LCD

This is a known fact that CRT monitors take more  power as compared to the LCDs.

If you have a CRT monitor, the big monitor with the bloated tail and a few KGs weight, you are consuming the most power. The power consumption of a CRT monitor ranges from 100watts to 300 watts depending on the size, model and make of the monitor. Typically, the older models used to consume more power and newer ones are better in terms of power consumption.

If you have a flatter variant of a screen that could be a TFT, LCD, LED or Plasma screen, you are using less power as compared to the CRT monitors. Most of the laptops, hand held devices like pdas and mobile phones are using this kind of displays these days. If you are using LCD, TFT or LED monitor for your computer as external display, your typical power consumption is somewhere between 50 watts to 200 watts depending on the size. For example this 15” LCD I have consumes 55 watts. There can be screens that take even less power.

This worksheet provides a more quantitative way of calculating your poswer consumption depending on different monitors you are using.

http://downloads.techrepublic.com.com/5138-10589-5698031.html?tag=content%3bleftCol

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by : admin Computer Science

Memory Myth


I’ve been using different memory cards in different devices. I’ve used MMCs, SD, MicroSD, Sony Memory stick and so on. I never bothered re-checking their capacity and trusted on the label on the card itself. I have been using a 2GB MMC-Mobile in my good old N72 and I never went into the phone’s memory monitoring software to see actually how much memory is available on the card. Recenly I got a SanDisk’s 16GB SDHC card and when I plugged it into my Nokia N82, it reports it as 15GB. Thats loss of a whole GB of data capacity. Then I plugged it into my BlackBerry and found that it reports it to be 14.8GB. Another 200MB lost. Then I decided to actually try a few other cards around. I investigated a little further. I plugged my 8GB Micro-SDHC card in my BlackBerry and it reported it to be 7.6 GB. Thats again not 8GB. Then I plugged a common 1GB Micro-SDHC card into my Nokia N82 and it reports it to be 964 MB.

The key point is, I never noticed the capacity loss on 1GB card because its only 60MB. While on a 16GB card its losing a whole 1.2GB.

Why is that happening? I revisitied my basic data capacity and storage unit concepts. Let me list down a few basic facts for you.

1 kilo-byte = 1kB = 1024 bytes
1 megabyte = 1MB = 1024kB = 1024×1024 bytes
1 gigabyte = 1GB = 1024MB = 1024x1024x1024 bytes

Therefore
16GB = 16 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes.

In reality, what memory card manufacturers do, they put it as follows:

1 GB card has slightly more than 1000,000,000 bytes.
It s hould actually be 1073,741,824

Similarly, 16 GB card actually has 16,000,000,000 bytes. This makes the total to 14.90GB

So if you buy 1GB, you should expect actully something less than that.

The thing which is bothering me is, my Nokia reports my 16 GB card as 15GB, while my BlackBerry reports it as 14.8, while it actually is 14.9 GB.

I’m pretty close in above calculation, but where do you think I’m going wrong?

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