The seller checked his online invoice again today – and the address shown was now the correct one, despite the fact you can’t change the address after checkout.

UP YOURS, EBAY.

WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?

Seriously, what led your designers to think this was in any way a good idea? This is the exact same BS you used to pull with LiveJournal updates, and it shows that you clearly haven’t learned how people use social media. You’re the foremost photo sharing website in the world, and yet you seem to have no concept whatsoever of how people want to share content outside your own site. Please get your act together. Some of us actually pay for your service, and this really needs to be better.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

• Ask me when the kit needs to be delivered, despite the answer being on page 1 of the tender document.
• Ask me if I’d like HP kit instead, when I’ve explicitly said that I don’t on page 1 of the tender document.
• Leave out the one component from a machine that I said was essential on the tender document.
• Quote for completely different models than those I asked for on the tender document despite me saying I wanted those exact models. You know, on the tender document. Bonus points for a different brand, and for not sending me the specification of the alternatives you quoted for.
• Quote for full-size tower workstations when I specified ultra-small workstations with a wall mount on the tender document.
• Quote for monitors with no USB ports when I explicitly said on the tender document that they must have USB ports.
• Quote for a 1 year warranty when I said I wanted 3 years on the tender document.
• Bump up the price by quoting a more expensive version of Windows than the one I asked for on the tender document.
• Make it clear in some other way that you HAVEN’T BOTHERED TO READ THE SODDING TENDER DOCUMENT.

Seriously, do you think I wrote up 6 pages of equipment specifications for a laugh? The whole idea of it was to take the guesswork out of the process for you, precisely so I wouldn’t treat your resulting half-baked and incompetent attempt at a quote with the utterly deserved mixture of bemusement and scorn that it received in equal measures.

When you call me next year to ask if you can quote on anything, I will say ‘no’. Understand that this will not be me declining you the chance to quote, it is a simple answer to the question of whether you are actually capable of producing a quote.

I have never seen a proper case study of how much money these mystical power savings could add up to, probably because there are a lot of variables between different schools, different hardware, and different patterns of usage. However, the soon-to-be-abolished Becta publish a somewhat useful ICT carbon footprint comparison tool, which is a spreadsheet into which you can plug all the appropriate figures for your school and get an estimate of your power usage. I say ‘somewhat’ useful because there is an idiotic bug in the Becta version which becomes apparent when you try to compare the power usage of different desktops, so here’s a fixed version (.xlsx) from yours truly.

When I plugged in the figures for my school, I got some interesting results. The first was that by switching to Windows 7 and implementing the power saving schedules I’ve been trialling, I stand to cut the workstation power usage across the school by just under 25%.

However, when I then looked at the amount of money our IT electricity bills turned into, it got even more interesting. This was partly because of the amount of blame apportioned to school IT in recent years for increased energy costs. The most recent place I saw this was in the previous government’s carbon management strategy, Climate change and schools. This stated that emissions from electricity use in schools increased by 31% between 1990 and 2006, and that:

“we can surmise that the increase in electricity consumption has in part been due to the computerisation of our schools, with widespread and important roll-out of information and communications technologies (ICT).”

While the same report also points the finger at longer school hours and increased use of heating, the implication was clear: computers are pushing up the bills. This annoyed me, not only because I don’t like being the whipping boy for the very real problem of climate change, but because this assumption was not backed up with a shred of evidence (as usual).

So, how does it measure up?

My deliberately pessimistic calculations of IT energy usage at my school peg us at just over £5,100 per year. We have more computers than most schools our size, and their age means they are pigs for energy usage, so I was expecting, based on the amount of stick IT attracts in energy efficiency circles, for that to be a big proportion of our bills.

That £5,100 is roughly equal to 10% of the total school annual electricity bill.

How about that for an inconvenient truth? Not exactly the 31% increase in emissions for which IT was somehow first in line for the blame, is it? What’s more, the IT share of the total energy bill drops even lower when the gas bills are included.

Maybe we’re a freak case. Perhaps our computers are at the pinnacle of energy efficiency despite some of them being 8 years old. Perhaps those 20 year old CRT monitors I recently threw out were actually running on nothing more than air. Perhaps the nursery school pupils have a secret underground cannabis factory that’s pushing the overall electricity costs through the roof.

What’s more likely, however, is that the hype about how much electricity IT wastes is utter, unsubstantiated BS.

Let’s actually do the math, everyone. Next time you get quizzed on your power saving measures, take the time to figure out how much power your IT estate actually uses, compare that to the school’s overall electricity bill, and then start asking some other people in the school why they aren’t turning the lights off when they leave the room, and why they have the sodding windows open in the middle of winter instead of turning the radiators down. Don’t bend over and take it when energy efficiency becomes the Head’s latest fad; if my experience is typical, we are not first in line for the blame.

Not so.

While that does help, there are significant benefits even without power management schedules. Simply put, Windows 7 uses less power. I measured the power usage of two computers; identical hardware, but with different software. One ran an RM CC3 build using Windows XP, the other ran Windows 7. Both machines were production workstations with all the normal software I install on them, and they were tested while idling at the logon screen. The machines themselves were 2009 Dell OptiPlex 360 workstations, and the power usage was measured using an in-line mains meter. I did not measure the monitor power usage.

Here’s what I found:

There are two lessons here: firstly, Windows XP is shockingly bad in sleep mode. Given that XP came out in 2001, this shouldn’t be entirely surprising, but I was still astonished by how high the power usage remained even when the machine was supposedly in its low-power mode. To an observer, the two machines were indistinguishable from each other at this time – power LED blinking, fans off, silent operation – but the difference in power usage was outrageous.

The second lesson appears to be that Windows 7 draws less power when you’re not using it. Later on I tested both machines using a CPU stress test, and they pulled the same amount of power, but when left idle, the Windows 7 machine averaged 10W less.

I should note that it’s entirely possible the RM background tasks were responsible for the latter discrepancy; I didn’t have a non-RM XP machine to test. No such difference could explain the sleep mode difference. Similar results emerged on different hardware, so this didn’t appear to be an anomaly with the Dell machines.

So, how much is that in cold hard cash? We’ll look at some more surprising results in part 2 later this week.