Hey ya all!!! I, too, am totally over winter. Spring has come and gone so many times this year it is hard on us. One week it will be +12C then the following -18. I was excited all week that I would be able to rake my lawn this weekend but old man winter threw me a curve ball and froze everything solid, yet again.... I have sown some of the slower growing/flowering annuals, like viola, marigold, lobelia.... as well as some perennials in hopes of first year blooms. I am fighting the urge to sow the rest as it is a touch early but it is sooooo hard on days like this. I actually amazed myself last weekend and drew up a planting plan for my bare root rose orders, it is so unlike me. I usually impulse buy then without thought or reason impulse plant. Are any of you making any radical changes in gardens or annual choices? SCG

hobby_libby- The average computer may typically use about as much energy as a 100 watt bulb...more if it's really high-powered, less if not, and you'll generally use less overall if you are talking about a laptap rather than a traditional computer with stand alone monitor. An LCD monitor fully on (or with a screensaver) might use about 50 watts. So if your computer and an LCD monitor are fully on 10 hours a day, you're talking about using 1.5 kWhr. The cost for a single kWhr is maybe 10-15 cents in many parts of the country, so your total energy cost to have a computer and monitor on for 10 hours a day might be about 20 cents. Now if you decide to have no screensaver AND have it go into sleepmode when you are not using it, you could save at least 15 cents a day, or maybe $50 a year...if you have air conditioning going year-round. However, during the heating months, the heat energy thrown off by the computer goes to heat your home and the furnace has to provide a little less heat, so you get little benefit there. And, of course if you actually have the computer in use, then your savings will be proportionally less. Bottomline: if you put your computer in sleep mode, with the screen off, and you don't use the computer much, you'll save enough each month to buy one extra latte at Starbucks. Don't get me wrong. Saving energy and money is a good thing, and I'm not trying to discourage you. I was just making the point that you are not going to see the massive savings you might have expected. If you want to understand where the electricity really gets eaten up in your home, and how to conserve so you can reduce your bill in a noticeable way, check out the link below. At the bottom of the linked page there is lots of good info on things you can do, and how much different things in your home account for in the overall energy picture. Here is a link that might be useful: Electric use

I've been deliberately putting my Toshiba Satellite laptop into hibernation during the day, whenever I'm not using the computer for an extended period of time. I started doing this because my laptop overheated once to the point where I could smell wires burning. : O And, it's overheated a few times since then, but not as much. So, that's the reason I use hibernation.

My laptop, sleep is slightly less than 1-watt load total on the a/c adapter. Sleep puts the configurations and all open items into RAM memory and keeps the memory powered just enough so it exists. When you power back on its there already in memory ready to go. Hibernate, writes everything to a file on the hard drive and uses no power at all. When you power back on the hard drive spins up to speed and it writes it into memory and within a few seconds its ready to go. Takes a few seconds longer than sleep as it has to write from hard drive. RAM is way faster storage. Hibernate can take a good chunk of hard drive space.