NEW,
GREENER COMPUTERS
Currently, computer manufacturers are designing computers to be more easily upgraded, thus extending their potential useful lifetime, reducing the number of toxic chemicals in their computers and creating more energy efficient computers [23]. Many of the recent performance enhancements in computer processors, such as multi-core (dual or quad core) processors save energy while improving performance [24].
The Evolve by Vas Obeyesekere, winner of this year’s International Green Computing Technology Design Competition, sponsored by Dell Inc. has an incredible array of environmentally friendly features, including:
•
printed circuit boards made from keratin and soy epoxy,
• a corn-based plastic case,
• an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display which is more efficient than a conventional LED display (which only uses as little as 25% of the energy of a traditional CRT monitor),
• an energy efficient solid state hard drive (similar to the flash memory used in USB thumb drives),
• and the recycled packaging material can be used as a computer stand and then re-used to return the computer to the manufacturer at the end of its lifetime [25].
• a corn-based plastic case,
• an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display which is more efficient than a conventional LED display (which only uses as little as 25% of the energy of a traditional CRT monitor),
• an energy efficient solid state hard drive (similar to the flash memory used in USB thumb drives),
• and the recycled packaging material can be used as a computer stand and then re-used to return the computer to the manufacturer at the end of its lifetime [25].
Although this is only a concept, some of its features are already in use in today’s computers (both the MacBook Air and Asus eee PC use solid state hard drives) and we are likely to see the adoption of similar features in new computers over the next few years.
LIBR 500: Foundations of Information Technology, School of Library, Archival and Information Science, University of British Columbia
Neil MacDonald
November 17th, 2008