Terra Novum - How Energy Star's Monitor Powermanagement Program Works

How ENERGY STAR's Monitor Power Management Program Works

Basically how Cadmus and Terra Novum's participation in this program works is we are on contract to the EPA to get x amount (currently 2 million) of computers to have power management enabled on them by y date (Sept. 2003 with a contract end date of 2005). Our services are free (paid for by taxpayer dollars) although limited (i.e.; providing support to system administrators instead of front line help desk support to end users). As for the technical means of how this is accomplished. Most Windows, Mac and Unix/Linux flavors come with some level of support for managing power management features, embedded in the BIOS, from within the operating system software. Our tools (limited to Windows although we can provide tips for other OSs as well) take advantage of these management features and, in the case of EZ Save and EZ GPO, simply control these features from a remote location the same you would any other portion of the OS that has registry settings and an API. Upon changing these settings, the OS and BIOS then take over the actual task of shutting down the monitors by sending a code down a carrier signal running on one of the lines between the video card and the monitor. This has been a thoroughly tested and established hardware feature since most high end 486 models. The criteria that is used to determine when the monitor should shut itself down (i.e.; sleep) is based on the system's idle timer so it measures periods of inactivity waiting for a period greater than what is specified to activate the sleep feature.

Various Methods of Enabling Power Management Features on Modern Computers

Enabling power management can be accomplished many ways such as using EZ Wizard, but those methods germane to most organizations will center around centralized management of the process. These products are tax payer funded and are free for your use.

Lets deal with the simple one first. EZ Wizard is, as its name implies, a wizard that steps the user through a few questions about how they would like their computer set up and from there does this for the user while keeping the user out of the PM control panel where they could potentially do damage. For individuals and small business this method of using EZ Wizard from an internal/external web page works well. For larger corporations EZ Save and EZ GPO can automate this process via two different methods. The basics of which are described below.

EZ Save operates by keeping binaries out on a network share that, when executed from a login script, read an ini file on said network share and make the appropriate changes to the PM settings. There are additional features to this method such as roll back and sampling with reports but that is the basic idea.

EZ GPO is needed, instead of simply using the standard GPO interface (Micrsoft Management Console or MMC), to accomplish centralized PM in a AD/GPO controlled environment. This is because MS made the registry key that contains the PM settings one long binary string instead of keeping all of the settings in more accessible DWORD/String formats across multiple keys. This entire string is inaccessible to GPOs natively (without significant programming against the ADSI interface) and even if that was not the case, the string is OS and hardware dependent and therefore can not be simply sent out to all computers yet is housed in the user portion of the registry.

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