NightlyShutdown software
NightlyShutdown software
Written by Ken Thursday, 03 July 2008 18:10
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Save money and energy with NightlyShutdown
NightlyShutdown price from free
Being environmentally friendly isn’t just about saving the planet any more – it can save considerable amounts of money too. With the average desktop PC setup costing around 1.5 pence per hour to run, making sure computers are switched off at night and at weekends could save businesses hundreds of pounds per computer every year. NightlyShutdown is one product that allows system administrators to easily make sure every computer under their control is turned off for the night.
Making sure the computer is turned off before leaving is often the last thing on the mind of the average office worker – beating the rush hour, planning what to do for the weekend, or making sure that invoice is in the postbag are often more important. Office PCs are often left running all night and weekend, and even with modern power saving features and screensavers this will result in a large amount of power being consumed.
UK-based software company ProvenWorks is aiming to make it easy for system administrators to ensure unused computers are turned off for the night. Their product NightlyShutdown is designed to automatically shut down a computer at a set time of day, in case someone has forgotten to turn their machine off.
NightlyShutdown is free to home users and small businesses (with under 10 computers). Larger businesses can licence it for £35 for every 10 computers – just £3.50 per computer. Potentially the product could pay for itself in just a few weeks!
The program runs as a service on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 2003 server (Linux, OS X and versions for older Windows operating systems are apparently in the pipeline) and sits in the background, controlled by registry settings. It can be configured not to shut down if a user is still logged on (useful if someone is working late) and can also be set to perform a forced shutdown (which will lose any unsaved user data).
The service is easy to install, however configuration can currently only be done by editing the registry. While this is fine for sysadmins, regular users might be a bit frightened. ProvenWorks does include a sample registry file with the program though.
For system administrators in charge of large networks, NightlyShutdown can be remotely deployed to every computer using Active Directory, thus making it very easy to set up. Different groups of computers can be controlled using different active directory policies (so the sales team, who sneak off to the pub at 4pm, can be shut down before the programming team, who always works late).