Kellieward

We have just purchased PowerMAN - the way it worked for us is that we got the full product for about a month. During this time they suggested we used the first week or two to do an audit and then experiment with different power saving techniques. We had a few questions during the process and they seemed to know their stuff. About half way through we got a report explaining the power statistics we had collected and making some suggestions which ultimately were pretty good. The guy we dealt with (Geoff) told us that there was a standard price plus an education discount. He said that the software should pay for itself in less than three months and if this wasn't the case they would make us a sensible offer. As it turned out the pay back period was less than 3 months so this never came up.

Thank you for the tips. I've enable the PowerMAN enforcement (aka "anti-insomnia") feature and I can already see a difference in yesterdays power management reports. I've started on the pupil machines and will then roll this out to the separate office workstations later. BTW: Just to revisit the GP v PowerMAN debate - one important difference for us was that we could have a different policy when no user was logged on. We have configured student workstations to log off after 90 minutes and then sleep when nobody is logged on for a few minutes. We've taken a completely different approach for the admin staff workstations and just sleep after a few minutes (with the user still logged on). We encourage the users to log off and if they do the PC then shuts down fully. Hopefully this maximises the savings. I tried but can't see how you can do this with native GP alone.

Sorry, I should have mentioned - we tried basic GPO before PowerMAN. We found the consistency was even worse. Some PCs would behave whilst others totally ignored the policy. We liked PowerMAN because it offers some nice reports and multiple policies per workstation / user. However, still not totally consistent.

We are using PowerMAN (v5.2) software for our network power management. The deployment has been pretty painless (mixed XP and Window 7) but the results are not always consistent. Some workstations hibernate as expected whilst others stubbornly ignore the policy we've deployed. Does anyone know why this happens please?