As part of it's engagement with the Carbon Trust's Higher Education Carbon Management Programme, the University of Hull is seeking to reduce its carbon emissions and decrease electricity use by 15% over the next few years.

A cornerstone of the University's energy reduction strategy is to turn off staff computers that are not in use and it has adopted Powerdown as a key energy saving solution. Powerdown is automatically deployed through Active Directory to over 1000 staff PC's and managed centrally through group policy to ensure that idle computers are quickly turned off to maximise energy savings.

We are pleased to announce that Powerdown Standard Edition 1.1 has been released and is now available for purchase through our web store. This new release contains major improvements and new features , including

• Greater energy savings
• OS power saving optimisation
• Active Directory integration
• Policy editing tool

All existing Powerdown 1.0 customers can upgrade to version 1.1. free of charge.

With this release we are also pleased to announce two new initiatives aimed at home and educational users.

• The Home Network edition of Powerdown is now free for users with less than 10 computers
• Schools, colleges and universities can now obtain an Educational licence for Powerdown free of charge. This licence entitles the institution to use Powerdown on an unlimited number of computers and to give Powerdown to their staff and students for use on personal computers at home.

Codefounders is dedicated to doing whatever it can to reduce the environmental impact of computing so we are excited to announce that, starting with the release of version 1.1, some Powerdown configurations will now be entirely free.

Any user will be entitled to download Powerdown and use it on up to 10 computers and this make Powerdown the ideal energy saving solution for home networks and very small businesses.