While the bamboo laptop and the mouse with a quick sleep button are certainly ways of making your computer setup a bit greener, I was very interested to see that D-Link has created a new green network switch. I hadn’t thought of making that part of my computer system green! 
The D-Link Green DGS-2208 Network Switch features eight different ports so you can hard-wire eight computers to your internet connection.
This cool gigabit switch detects which of your ports are active (which have a computer that’s on and working) and then only powers those active ports. The switch can also send more or less power to ports depending on how much cable is between the switch and the computer (or other device like a networked printer). The switch can determine the cable length automatically, so you don’t even have to measure that. In contrast to this, a normal network switch powers all ports at once and uses the same energy for all ports no matter the cable length.
D-Link’s examples of various computer setups and use show that their switch can save up to around 40 percent of energy that would otherwise be used by a network switch. That’s a pretty good amount, especially for offices when computers are powered down for more than twelve hours a day. The green network switch is available in five and eight port models, and they’re no more expensive than other network switches: the five port is $32.49, while the eight port is $46.99. I really love the idea of this, but there’s just one thing missing: it doesn’t do wireless internet.
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on Jun 26th, 2009 at 11:14 am
This is cool. But I am with you. I am usually using wireless…