Quote Originally Posted by CockySOB View Post
The motherboard will have a setting to enable power-saving mode for the hard drives, the video-output and the CPU. I usually turn off the hard drive power down, set the video-out to 10 minutes, and the CPU to 20 minutes. The problem is that Windows XP likes to auto-fire a lot of processes which can wake up your monitor, hard drives and CPU despite your best efforts. It really takes someone who can sit down and look over your system to actually get all the settings optimized, and even then there is a good chance that one or two setting could get overlooked.

BTW, I leave mine on 24x7 so that maintenance tasks like hard drive optimization, updates and anti-virus scans can all take place while I sleep. That way my system is primed for best performance when I need to use it. This means that my usage overall is probably closer to 320 kWh per month which would be around US$40 per month even with my optimizations to the power settings.
I think I'll try the video, 10 mins and CPU 20 mins thing. Can't hurt.