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I did until five minutes ago. Until I read:
Kill your stupid screen saver. In the good old days of tube monitors, screen savers such as those unforgettable flying toasters were invented to prevent burn-in, a permanent shadow branded into the phosphors of your monitor by a static image of, say, a spreadsheet that you left on your screen all weekend.
Well, flat-screen LCD monitors don’t burn in, so if you still have flying toasters or an endlessly looping slide show of your adorable niece and nephew, you’re behind the times. When you’re not sitting in front of your monitor it should be off off off.
It warmed my heart to read at Green Daily that Telstra, the biggest phone company in Australia, has removed all the corporate screen savers from
the 36,000 computers in its offices. What will happen? The change will cut tons of CO2, which they claim will be the equivalent of taking 140 cars off the road for a year. Good on ya, mate.
As soon as I found out that screen savers waste power on flat screen monitors, I went into the control panel, clicked the Display icon and the screen saver tab and found a button called Power that lets me turn the monitor “off off off” when I’m not using it.
I did it because my monitor looks like the model in the top photo. (But if your monitor looks like the one in the bottom pic, the one sitting at the curb, then keep the flying toasters.)
as part of our Green effort. But I’m still waffling on my home laptop because my screen saver is Italian vocabulary and phrases that comes up randomly and I really do learn words and phrases that way.
The claim that screensavers waste energy is outright false. If you click all the way to thru to the original article about some company in Australia, you’ll read that they switched 36,000 LCD workstations to blank screensavers.
LCD’s do not suffer from the same sort of burn-in that you get on old CRTs. Nevertheless, the screensavers available on Windows and Mac, including laptops, will turn off the screen’s backlight after a period time, which does save power.
Turn your screensaver back on!