Minimizing Power Consumption by Personal Computers: A Technical Survey

Recently, the demand of "Green Computing", which represents an environmentally responsible way of reducing power consumption, and involves various environmental issues such as waste management and greenhouse gases is increasing explosively. We have laid great emphasis on the need to minimize power consumption and heat dissipation by computer systems, as well as the requirement for changing the current power scheme options in their operating systems (OS). In this paper, we have provided a comprehensive technical review of the existing, though challenging, work on minimizing power consumption by computer systems, by utilizing various approaches, and emphasized on the software approach by making use of dynamic power management as it is used by most of the OSs in their power scheme configurations, seeking a better understanding of the power management schemes and current issues, and future directions in this field. Herein, we review the various approaches and techniques, including hardware, software, the central processing unit (CPU) usage and algorithmic approaches for power economy. On the basis of analysis and observations, we found that this area still requires a lot of work, and needs to be focused towards some new intelligent approaches so that human inactivity periods for computer systems could be reduced intelligently.