Anti-virus programs and carbon footprint
There’s been a bunch of noise about carbon footprint and electronic equipment in the press lately. As I was trying to catch up, my laptop reminded me that something was taking up a bunch of CPU. Now that I don’t use a desktop anymore, I can literally “feel the heat” when it’s not happy.
Invariably, it’s some anti-virus thing trying to download some “update” or “scanning” my computer for files to “quarantine”. Got me thinking – if you count the zillions of computers and the compute cycles used by these programs, the carbon footprint might beat a lot of web 2.0 companies handily.
Categories: Technology
I took my step in reducing carbon footprint at my parent’s place in India these holidays. I was aghast to find out my father’s desktop to be even more infected with keyloggers, ad popups and other assorted malware than usual. In my attempts at cleaning it, I ended up with an unusable Windows installation. I installed Ubuntu on the desktop and added some convenient desktop shortcuts to useful programs for him (mostly Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office and PPPoE launcher). So far (it has been less than a month), he seems to be fine with the change. If he can live with this setup for another year, I will probably just buy him a Mac.
Good to hear that. My mom once used emacs to send me email from a Linux box circa 1997. But these days it’s harder to get them to use something else mainly because of video chat programs which work only on windows.
They do have this annual windows reinstall exercise. But over time it’s becoming harder to find someone to do it for them. Inflation and the service people probably taking up jobs as software engineers or call center reps.
My in-laws experimented with a mac mini, but switched to a windows box – probably because of getting MS-word attachments related to their business.
The netbooks and platforms like Adobe flash could change the game in the coming years though. I think I know what I’m going to get for them next