I go out to the store this morning and buy one, bring it home, plug it in and I decide to try and figure out what kinds of loads various things sitting on my desk create. I have a little Verizon router for FIOS – it uses about 5 watts. The external USB hard drive about 8 watts. The mac mini that I have running Fedora 8 on it uses about 7 watts. Not too bad, all things considered.

So I decided to drop the router and the drive and find out how much the mini drew when it was running and how much it drew when it was suspended. So I unplugged them and then suspended the mini. The power went from 7 watts to 10. Huh? I started the mini back up and the power usage dropped back to 7. Suspend, it jumps back up to 10. That’s right. My mini running Fedora 8 uses more power when it’s suspended than when it’s sitting at an idle desktop.

I have a new rule. Richard Hughes isn’t allowed to complain about anything Firefox-related until my computers running Linux use less power suspended than when they are sitting at an idle desktop.