yea, for environmental reasons, i strongly urge people to turn off their computers when not in use. Even in standby the electricity consumption is massive. I leave a server on 24/7, but then, it's serving files. I do have the harddrives set to aggressively shut down when not in use. Unfortunately, that's basically only 1 or 2 drives out of 5 due to the nature of the server. The only other equipment that I own that stays on 24/7 is my cell.

Think of those numbers in the US ... *shudder**

As another piece of anecdotal information, when i switched from running an x86 machine for my router to a wrt54g, my electricity bill dropped something like US$10 /month. That's serious savings. Here at techwarelabs, we promote environmentally friendly use of technology ;P