OP was part serious, part joke, but mostly my real thoughts on the matter. Meaning, I think people often tend to look to the wrong places for conservation, micromanaging small difficult things when there are much easier and more effective solutions that usually end up helping you instead of hurting you.
People like to suggest riding your bike to work for example - ok, I could do that. I'd have to get up an hour earlier and risk getting caught in the rain, getting hit by a car, etc, and I'd have to then ride all the way home after a ten hour day - and my day, by the way, ends at 3 PM so the sun is just at that point where you don't want to be anywhere underneath it. Arrive home, collapse from exhaustion, repeat.
BUT ON THE PLUS SIDE I'D SAVE $50 A MONTH ON GAS! (Alternatively, I could just buy one less bottle of vodka a month, or eat out 2 less times, or order 2 less pizzas, etc)
Another example, a lot of people like to use these things called "torrents". Well, it necessitates leaving your computer on for long periods of time. Instead of your 300 watt behemoth, buy some tiny little netbook or something and use that for such "passive tasks" instead, and leave your computer in sleep mode so it's hardly using any power but can still start running at a moment's notice.
Buying more efficient stuff can be expensive if you upgrade for no other reason than to reduce your hydro bill, but if you're upgrading anyway, paying 50% extra cash for the PSU that wastes 50% less energy isn't such a huge deal.
Example: in December I was running an "Ultra" (generic China brand) 750 watt PSU, Radeon 4890, and C2D E8400 @ 3.6 ghz.
Now I'm using a Seasonic 750 watt PSU, Radeon 5850, and CPU is @ 3.45 ghz, but I was able to drop the voltage by 0.15v as a consequence and, as a happy coincidence, my RAM is now able to run 30% faster because of FSB sync issues I had previously. My room temperature has dropped 3 degrees and my CPU now idles at 39 degrees instead of 44. I also no longer need high airflow in my case so I switched my 4 case fans to silent ones and my room is jut altogether so much more pleasant to be in.
I haven't compared my electricity bills but I think at the very least, judging by the obvious reduction in waste heat, I've offset any increase caused by switching from my 22" monitor to a 32" TV for my main display.
Master-Athmos wrote:2) Buy (and install) a newer graphics card which is energy-efficient. Cheap, used Radeon 4890s are beginning to flood the market and used very little power at idle especially.
Actually all of the 48xx cards were bad at idle power consumption. You still could do something about it by using software which makes them use even lower clocks but still the results weren't that good. That then was one of the improvements of the new 5000 series which does a great job at this...
4890 was a unique case IIRC since it was actually based on an improved architecture rather than just being a higher-clocked 4870. As such it did actually have reasonably good idle power usage if I remember right.
