Whether you are environmentally conscious or just looking to save some cash, the rising prices of energy have everybody looking to cut back on costs. If you've ever wondered how much power your computer consumes, there's a free power management tool called Local Cooling here to help you out.

The goals of the Local Cooling project include cutting energy costs and reduction of greenhouse emissions, and the utility shows detailed results of how much power you've saved before and after installing the software. They have a goal of creating a community of 100,000,000 PC users who want to help reduce CO2 gas emissions.

After downloading the application you will be prompted to create an account so you can share and compare your power consumption with the other members of LocalCooling.com

Right away you can to the My Power tab and see how much wattage your devices are consuming.  It looks like my PC can use some tweaking for sure.

my power consumption

The power management tool is very easy to configure.  Under the General tab you can choose a pre-selected power saving mode or create a custom mode.

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You will be able to monitor your statistics via the application gadget on your machine and also on the website.

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This project could really end up being quite large and save a lot of energy and money in the long run.  In fact there is a section dedicated to network administrators to  utilize Local Cooling on their respective networks which will definitely create nice gains.  Plus it is always fun to compare stats with other users and actually see you're making a difference!

According to their website this project actually started in November 2006.  Because of such popular demand, similar applications, and better power management in Vista, Uniblue is no longer offering this application as a download on their site directly, though you can still download it from download.com.  You can also adjust power settings in XP to save power and money.

This does not mean the project is dead, however. If you are interested in saving the environment, you can continue to help the program further by participating in their survey or in the Local Cooling community Hey!  Better late than never!

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Download LocalCooling from download.com

Visit the Local Cooling Homepage at localcooling.com

Editor's Note: The company that created this free software is also a sponsor of this site, but not for this free software package. We're fans of full disclosure and only write about software that we've tested personally.