At Washington Mutual, now part of Chase, Surveyor was installed last year, leading its CIO, Debora Horvath, to tell CIO magazine in July that it was saving 65% of the energy formerly consumed by 44,000 PCs. Horvath did not survive the acquisition process with Chase and was not available for comment, but her conclusion at the time was that PC energy management would save Washington Mutual $3 million a year.

Enforcing energy-saving policies is a big part of what Surveyor does. It can tell when a PC has been idle for 20 minutes and order the monitor shut down; after 30 minutes, the PC is put into a standby or trance state that saves more energy. Employees can reactivate their machines at any time and are taught how to override the energy-conserving system to do what they need to do after hours and on weekends.

But not everything is so simple as imposing policies on groups. In every group there are many exceptions, "insomniacs" who refuse to go to sleep when told to do so, and "narcoleptic cases" that don't want to wake up. Part of the energy savings comes from addressing the units that persistently refuse to conserve.

"Some applications don't want to be shut down and continue running. From its knowledge of software that doesn't behave well, Surveyor can supply a little script that will put that application to sleep," Jaech pointed out.

Other computers won't go to sleep because their drivers are out of date. In his own home, Jaech found it hard to get one PC to save energy because its video driver was out of date and wouldn't respond to the order to turn off the monitor. Updating drivers to ones that communicate with a centralized energy management system solves some of the hardcore cases, he added.

Surveyor is priced at $15 to $20 per PC. It can save $20 to $60 per year in energy costs, Jaech claimed. If Washington Mutual's $3 million in savings is applied evenly to its 44,000 PCs, it comes to $68.18 in savings per PC. But no laptops were included in that implementation; laptop savings tends to be lower, Horvath indicated.

Pacific Gas & Electric in Northern California will reimburse a purchaser of Surveyor at the rate of $15 per PC, if the buyer enters a three-year contract. Puget Sound Energy offered to pay back 50% of the Issaquah School District's purchase price when it was found that Surveyor was saving 113 kilowatt-hours per PC per year there.

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This article was edited on 3/4 to correct savings percentages .