The BBC website is reporting on "Green Shift", a taskforce led by Manchester City Council to oversee the piloting of a "green PC" service in which individual machines use 98% less energy than standard PCs.
The way the PC industry operates is simply not green. I'm writing this blog on a PC that was last upgraded in 2002. It has the same 1.7 GHz Pentium chip, 512 MB RAM and graphics adapter it originally came with. I've added an M-Audio sound card, a second hand SCSI disc system from eBay, DVD rewriter and Freeview adapter.
I can see no reason to upgrade, as it is powerful enough to run all the applications I use including the CPU intensive stuff like the sound editing I need for the podcasts we publish on ComputerWeekly.com and for manipulating 10 mega pixel images for the digital photography course I have recently started.
So I haven't upgraded to Windows Vista. My PC is simply not compatible with Vista. Why should I throw away a perfectly good machine, simply because the new software won't run on it.
Operating system makers, games and application developers take note: if IT is to turn green the industry must support the installed base of legacy PCs.
