Fewer than 10% of users actively engage sleep timeout functionality while over 50% disable default timeout settings

London, UK September 4, 2009 – 1E, a leading provider of software and services that specializes in reducing IT operational costs within business and government environments, today announced in-house research that explores how users currently fail to exploit the money and energy saving benefits available through managing their PC power usage. As the PC Power Management market leader, 1E gathered information from over 3,000 end user production PC’s over a one month period. The findings show that only 9% of desktop users of Windows XP, which ships with the sleep timer disabled, actually changed this setting and enabled a sleep timeout. In addition, 55% of users of Windows Vista, which ships out of the box with power management enabled, had turned off the sleep function completely.

“These facts together show that generally end users don’t care about energy saving on their PCs and would much rather the PC was available when they want to use it rather than having to wait for it to come back to life once it’s gone to sleep,” explains Mark Blackburn, Product Manager, 1E. “It is critical that organizations take heed of this – there is no point in unnecessarily restricting your end users by setting power scheme sleep timeouts as users will typically ignore or override them. Instead, turning off power scheme sleep timeouts entirely and setting a nightly scheduled intelligent power-down using software such as NightWatchman results in much greater energy savings of up to 87%.”

NightWatchman is simple to implement and enables businesses both large and small to reduce their PC energy consumption without impacting their productivity. In a Windows environment, regardless of IT maturity or existing management tools, NightWatchman highly flexible solution is able to perfectly combine the needs of end-users and systems management, with the need to save money and keep costs down. PCs can be woken at the start of the working day, put into a low power state at the end of the day and then activated for a maintenance window out-of-hours. User acceptance is one of the key factors to a successful PC power management implementation and NightWatchman ensures that power saving measures can be implemented without impacting or annoying users.

“Since NightWatchman uses its own methods to determine when users have gone home and then manages the transition to a low power state, this means that your end users are not annoyed by their PC going to sleep during the day,” concludes Blackburn. “The end result is happier end users because their PCs are available when they need them, and happier shareholders because of the money and CO2 emissions you’re saving.”

For further information, read 1E’s “Why Power Schemes are not enough” report