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by NavinF 1789 days ago
Still a very annoying law because it prevents you from enabling stuff like wake-on-lan on modern PCs. You have to turn off all the power compliance toggles in the BIOS or it will power off the NIC and break a bunch of other stuff. If the vendor doesn't let you disable compliance mode, you're SoL.

Idle PCs consume roughly 0% of the country's energy. If they wanna reduce it anyway, they should put an energy star sticker on computers so people can save money with more efficient machines.

2 comments

Why can you not use wake on lan? Apple devices still have full networking capabilities while using less than 1w. It doesn't take over 11w to wake on lan unless the firmware is insanely inefficient.

This law will get mobo vendors to fix their products causing power savings world wide.

That is not accurate - take a look at Page 9 of the product compliance datasheet: https://downloads.dell.com/rdoc/dell%20alienware%20ryzen%20e...

WOL and similar features do not change power consumption and this is not where the listed PC's fail. They fail on idle/standby power consumption and to be clear - there is NO reason they have to. Similar spec'd PC's can be purchased that meet these requirements.

Hmm I assumed that this was similar to the EU reg which did lead to NICs being turned off even when you have WoL enabled. The NIC definitely affects idle power consumption and I would not be surprised if vendors take the path of least resistance (disabling features that are only used by "power users") until their hardware meets the requirements.

I'm sure similar PCs meet the requirements, and I'm also sure they're more expensive on average because they are newer. Too bad consumers are not allowed to make choises for themselves.