‘Green’ PC Functions Among Highlights of Toshiba’s New Products
LONDON -- Toshiba touted power-saving notebook PCs, among other green products, at a briefing for European reporters last week. Besides its ‘Eco Utility’ tool for laptops, the company introduced a growing selection of LCD TVs with either energy-saving LED back-lighting or edge-lighting.
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The company’s new software for Windows 7 notebooks lets owners see how much power they're using, or the CO2 emissions they're causing, by pushing a green button. The Eco Utility tool also lets users optimize power consumption by dimming display brightness, switching off LEDs and readjusting the sleep mode settings for the hard drive, Toshiba said. For older notebooks, a “soft” green button appears onscreen to use the software, but on the company’s new and Satellite A500 and U500 PCs it’s a dedicated hardware button on the keyboard.
In normal mode the Eco Utility displays a real-time graph onscreen, which shows the power consumption in watts with a history file that logs accumulated power consumption. Eco Utility also offers the option to convert power consumption, in kilowatt-hours, to carbon emissions in kilograms of CO2. The measurements are based on the national power generation efficiency rate which the Japan Electrical Manufacturers Association has calculated for 58 regions worldwide, Toshiba said. Users select their home region from a drop down menu, or type in a conversion rate if the home region is not listed.
Using Eco Utility mode can reduce power consumption up to 25 percent when a laptop is in idle mode, Toshiba said. The power-saving comparison was based on a Toshiba Satellite A500, which on AC power uses between 15 and 20 watts in idle mode and 4 watts in Eco mode, the company said.
Among other PC innovations, users of Toshiba’s new E205 laptop can avoid not just the inconvenience of connecting other portable devices to the Internet, but also the charges levied by hotels and public venues for Wi-Fi Internet access, the company said. Its “My WiFi” software uses Intel’s Calpella chip set to let up to eight devices cannibalize a single Wi-Fi connection.
Once devices like an iPod, MP3 player or Smartphone have been set up to connect to the laptop by Wi-Fi, they can then connect to the Internet using the laptop as a Wi-Fi access point, Toshiba said. So, only the laptop need be signed up for an Internet connection at a hotel. The cannibal devices all remember their previous connection settings for the laptop. This saves the inconvenience of setting up each individual device with a temporary Wi-Fi user name and password -- and also saves on cost because only one paid-for Internet connection is needed, Toshiba said.
More Toshiba software, called “WiDi,” lets notebooks connect wirelessly to an HDTV across a room and stream HD video at 720p, with 1080p promised for the future. A Push2TV receiver, made by Netgear, connects to an HDTV by HDMI cable and by Wi-Fi to the notebook.
Toshiba wouldn’t discuss the proprietary compression used to send the HD signal. But at the London demonstration, a notebook streamed video from the BBC’s iPlayer catch-up TV service to a Toshiba HDTV at 1280 by 720p resolution. We noticed a delay of about one second between the images on the PC and TV screens, which is a telltale sign of very high levels of compression and signal processing.