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The question, though, is what marvelous new code makes this miracle possible. The answer? They fixed three stupid mistakes that have cost the world billions of dollars and millions of tons of CO2 in the past five years.

First, Microsoft never put power-saving options high on the list of default specs. In order for XP to run smoothly, with all its bells and whistles going, desktop machines had to run in "high-performance" mode, the equivalent of flooring your Honda at every green light. So the defaults were often set to "High Performance." Even when they weren't, consumers generally chose the setting themselves, not realizing that it had any affect on power consumption.

The second mistake was a flaw in the much touted "sleep" mode. Sleep mode saves a ton of power, it is a very good idea, and essential, especially for portable devices. Studies of Windows 95 and 98 had shown that users hated to turn computers off because the boot times were so long.

Sleep mode was supposed to be the answer to this. The problem is that Windows XP lets any program override the sleep function. So if you have an anti-virus program running in the background, it might not allow the computer to sleep. This flaw is the cause of countless failed laptop batteries, and the complete avoidance of the sleep function by desktop users.