Saving Power

Doing a bit of working out, I've found out that my PC if left on 24 hours uses around 5units (kwh) of power with the monitor and speakers on which is costing around 55p(80c) a day and driving up our electricity bill. I was wondering if you can get low power modes that, if I was to leave it on unattended that would mean I would still be downloading from BT and IRC would stay connected etc?

I've already got the monitor set up for power saving

That sounds a lot like Intel's SpeedStep system, where it'll underclock the processor to save batteries if it's not running at 100% CPU load. I don't know if anyone makes a such thing for desktop PCs, but you can achieve similar results by underclocking your CPU manually by 25-50% and disconnecting peripherals (especially ones with moving parts, like hard drives and CD/DVD drives) that you don't need. (I'd also suggest setting your hard drives to power down after a certain amount of time, but you mentioned BT so I don't know if that'll work well for you).

>>1
Electricity is expensive for you. Even so, it's not too much, considering what you're getting with your computer. But you don't have to have the monitor and speakers on. You may also unplug all USB devices save for the keyboard. Don't enable the HD power off feature though; anything but powering off your hard drives. It hurts them.

computer's don't use any energy at all. I think it's something in the range of like 3 lightbulbs, but Google fucking sucks and I don't know the terminology.

The monitor is what uses energy. Enable the monitor power saving function and set it to screen saver at 2 minutes or something.

>>3

I concur; it killed my Western Digital because it was trying to spin down and spin up at the same time and fucked it royally (probably because the arm deployed before the platter was up to full speed and crashed).

>>2
AMD's Cool 'n' Quiet is the same idea, for desktops.

Leave the drives spinning=YES!
As for monitors, well for CRTs I've always just used the "OFF" button.