Here's an idea that sounds great in principle: have MS ship out a critical update that maxes out the power savings mode on every network connected PC. Who could be against power savings and less waste?

Microsoft should issue a software upgrade to every computer running Microsoft Windows worldwide. The upgrade would adjust the machine's energy-saving settings for maximum efficiency. Of course, this upgrade would have to allow critical systems to opt out. Nobody wants air traffic control computers to suddenly go into deep hibernation. But correcting for critical systems should be very simple for a company that churns out millions of lines of code every year.

The devil is in the toss off line at the end. Systems aren't waving flags that say "me, me! I'm critical!". Look at the roll out of IE7 - MS has decided to make that a critical upgrade, and if you don't want it (and many corporations don't want it yet), you have to opt out. That means that IE 7 will slip unwanted onto a fairly large number of systems.

That's a minor thing compared to the "max power savings" idea though.

The settings on the right are the maxed out power savings mode. Do you want servers that got missed hibernating after this goes through? What about connected hospital systems? Or traffic monitoring systems? There's no end to the list of systems that could be affected badly, given an admin mistake in not opting out.

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