Green tech products sprout at FOSE

By Doug Beizer

By Doug Beizer

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The national trend of going green hit this year's FOSE 2008 Conference and Expo with dozens of technology vendors touting the environmentally friendly benefits of their products.

The power modes are configurable through included software for Windows platforms.The Kanguru Eco Drive is also compliant with the Restriction of HazardousSubstances Directive, an international directive to restrict the use of six hazardous materials in the manufacture of certain types of electrical equipment. The materials are lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, PBB and PBDE flame retardants.

The national trend of going green hit this year's FOSE 2008 Conference and Expo with dozens of technology vendors touting the environmentally friendly benefits of their products.

The Power Manager from Hewlett-Packard, for example, is software designed to make modifying power settings easier and more interactive.

The software, which is expected to be a free offering starting in May, works with the power manager settings that are already on PC operating systems. A slider interface is used to change power settings. Slide it all the way to the right for the most ecofriendly setting; the farther to the left, the less savings.

"You can customize your energy costs by entering the kilowatt rate in your location," said Nancy Bowman, an HP product portfolio manager for business desktops. "It breaks down the savings into dollars, miles driven and pounds of CO2 saved."

Another energy-saving product is Lenovo's ThinkCentre M57/M57P Eco, an ultrasmall desktop PC. It received Greenguard certification from the Greenguard Environmental Institute, an industry-independent, nonprofit organization.

The ThinkCentre M57/M57P is Energy Star 4.0 rated and the first ThinkCentre with recycled material from consumer plastics.

"We are quite proud to say the ThinkCentre M57/M57P is the first desktop ever to meet our rigorous standards for chemical emissions," said Carl Smith, Greenguard Environmental Institute chief executive officer.

Greenguard certification means the ThinkCentre M57/M57P was tested for up to 2,000 different chemical emissions.

Kanguru Solutions, a portable hard drive provider, demonstrated its Kanguru Eco Drive, an environmentally friendly and energy-efficient external hard drive.

It has three built-in power saving modes and automatically gauges hard drive usage to reduce power consumption by up to 75 percent, and extends the life of the hard drive.

The three modes are:

  • Idle (drive operates at 80 percent of normal consumption after 3 seconds of inactivity).
  • Standby (drive operates at 10 percent to 20 percent of normal consumption after 3 minutes of inactivity).
  • Power Down (drive operates at 5 percent to 10 percent of normal consumption after 5 minutes of inactivity).




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