My Lion King Forum

I just discovered a nifty little program called Granola. Yes, like the grain/seed (I don't care which).

What it does when run is it optimizes the CPU in your computer to lower its energy usage without actually harming performance. As such, the differences are can be quite minor depending on how you look at it. I am running it right now, and it tells me that if I run it all the time my computer will be on (I actually turn it off at nigh - even better), I will save 161.4 kWh in one year ($19.35 USD). This sound like a lot, but my CPU is a somewhat old Intel Quad Core Q6600. It's good, but it's not comparable to say, the i series of processors.

It makes sense that the best thing will be to turn your computer off when you are not using it, but if you are using a laptop and put it to sleep, or leave it on because you will use it soon, then you might consider running this little application. And it runs in the background, so you don't notice it.

Here's the link to their main website: http://grano.la/

You also might be wondering why I posted this in the World Issues section versus the Smartypants section, well I believe that taking care of the planet is a world issue to be solved by humans. And in this case, I guess that every little bit can count.

That's interesting! I'm going to try it

Nice, Im soo going to try this once my laptop will be fixed ¬.¬ thanks anyway for posting this up DGFone

I'm trying it right now and still haven't noticed any difference in my computer's performance which is great.

Another good thing with it is that it allows you to see the cumulative of the energy, CO2 and money that you've saved by using it. You can even install it on other computers and link them to the same account (up to 5 I think)to see how much you've saved cumulatively in your house.

The only thing I'm not sure is how it calculate the amount of CO2 that I've saved since it's not every countries that use the same methods to produce energy and they don't all produce the same amount of carbon dioxide.


Anyway, thanks for sharing this DGFone. =P

Well, I ran it for almost a full day, and also ran it while using power-demanding applications. (Yes, games.)

And the pros: I did not notice any performance drop! So even while my GPU was under a load (And I assume my CPU as well), the drop in CPU performance wasn't noticeable. So this actually works as advertised!

The cons: I can't find the one file to select in order to run this app right away whenever I start up my computer.

The weird: I have finally saved a penny ($0.01 USD) on the electricity bill! Yeah... Like I said: Every little bit counts.