Laptop computers are so convenient. Until you lose one (Unencrypted NHS laptop lost, www.computing.co.uk/2220345). But a laptop is like a personal organiser - personal. People think: "It's mine - how dare you tell me what I can and cannot do with it."

Think about how many times each day your personal data is entered on a computer. If government departments are incapable of enforcing data security then the battle to secure our privacy is already lost.
For every high-profile event reported there must be thousands less newsworthy that are not reported.

Peter Ridgers

Avoiding the issue is not the answer to the oil price rise (Surge in oil prices hits IT, www.computing.co.uk/2219448).

As energy costs rise inexorably, the need for a detailed view of where energy is being consumed becomes business-critical. This is relevant to IT, facilities and finance - they need to know where the energy is going.

Before you can identify opportunities to make savings and improve efficiencies, or to charge based on consumption, you need to measure what you are consuming  and establish benchmarks.

The fact that datacentre owners do not know the "true cost" and do not have the tools in place to do this
is a good reason to remedy that, not to keep a lid on it.

Philip Petersen

The price of oil and gas will continue to rise, and everyone will take a hit in the short term at least (Surge in oil prices hits IT, www.computing.co.uk/2219448).

Virtualisation can help reduce power consumption, but the savings are not enough to offset continuous rises over the coming years.

The obvious and only long-term solution is to invest in viable alternatives to oil and gas. However, with the UK government widely expected to miss the 20 per cent renewable target by 2020, the solution seems to be for industry to secure its own renewable sources.

Few companies are willing to sacrifice profits just to tell a nice environmental story. But with some economists predicting oil prices of $250 (£126) a barrel, investing in green power sources is starting to make business sense.

As energy prices in IT departments start hitting the bottom line, we are likely to see sustainable power move from the marketing office into the boardroom, and companies not looking into renewable energy sources now will be left behind.

James Carnie, eLinia

Are energy prices a cause for consolidation (Surge in oil prices hits IT, www.computing.co.uk/2219448)? Supply versus demand is a point to ponder here.

Providing servers that are more efficient and applying technologies such as virtualisation are great low-level steps, helping on the supply side. But changing behaviours to reduce demand for unnecessary servers and ad hoc file storage is surely the bigger challenge.

Matt Quinn

As an IT manager I receive constant requests for new PCs despite having nearly all Pentium 4-based machines.

I have found that reformatting and upgrading memory to 1GB or 2GB gives PCs that are about five years old a new lease of life.

Surely this is good for green IT, even if it does not give users the short-lived "wow" of having a new dual-core PC just opening Word documents.

K Paterson

My experience of suppliers is the same as your columnist - whether buying software or hardware (Hard sell is becoming hard buy, www.computing.co.uk/2217764).

Some suppliers, despite having unfettered access to us - a revenue stream - continually find ways to make no effort and seem to require being spoon-fed. Why is that?

John Romeis

As a network manager in a school environment I find the biggest problem I come across is the support staff put "in my way" as part of BSF (Vice-like grip, letters.computing.co.uk).

For example, I had a hardware failure on the internet connection which I diagnosed, but I have to report to the company put in place under the BSF agreement. Twenty minutes later I get a phone call from a field engineer who goes through some diagnostics which I had already tried, which is then referred to the corporate IT department of our council.

Twenty minutes after the call from the engineer I get a call from the council's IT  department, which diagnoses a failure on the fibre converter which needs to be swapped out. The response I get is I have to contact the support company who deals with schools, who will then  contact the same person I have just spoken to, to arrange replacement parts to be sent out to them, then they will come out and change the failed item.

In the old system in the days before BSF, all I had to do was make one phone call and diagnose the issue.
Once this was done an agreement was made on when and where the hardware item was replaced. Nine times out of 10, I met the engineer halfway between his base and mine and exchanged the parts.
Most fixes were sorted within the hour. This incident was still going 12 hours after the fault was reported. By saying the likes of   in-house support staff stand in the way of education is a joke.

We know more of what is going on and work harder than most to deliver a system which meets the needs of pupils and staff and is as cutting edge as is possible to the tight budgets we are given.

Simon Dart

Johan Rock is absolutely right that backups are still one of the least appreciated aspects of IT until, in many cases, it is too late (Back up or face the consequences, letters.computing.co.uk).

I still come across businesses that are so cavalier with their data it is a wonder that they stay in business - unfortunately, many fail after a serious event such as a fire or flood.

What I find even more amazing are the companies that spend large amounts of money on exotic backup architectures, but never find time to test a restore of their backups. Many home PC users are just as much in the dark, which is surprising when just about every PC has a read-write device and with free backup software available on the internet it could not be easier.

It is even more incredible when you think that 8GB memory sticks are now available for less than £50 - less than it costs to fill the average family car with petrol.

Mike McNamara

The computers for pupils scheme that offers free PCs to low-income families is bundled either with a 3G modem and a data limit such as 4GB per month, or recipients take out ADSL contracts, so there is no issue of them running up a large phone bill (PC gone mad, letters.computing.co.uk).

As for them being able to afford an Xbox but not a computer, this might be true - but it is a sad fact of life that kids would rather have an Xbox than have a PC.

Providing a family with a PC not only encourages kids but the whole family to use IT. I believe the notebook is school property, so any loss is treated as losing school property in the same way as any other equipment.

I agree that giving away laptops in this way is not the best use of funds - especially as notebooks become useless piles of junk after about two years and often do not even last that long in the hands
of juveniles.

I would rather they were given PCs than notebooks, or the money was used to hire  a good teacher or provide teacher training. Giving away equipment is not  education; give a student a pen and you have a scribbler, but fire his or her imagination and you could have a Shakespeare.

Steve, submitted on the web

Giving PCs to low-income families is another bonkers initiative (Government aims to bridge digital divide).

These people cannot afford a PC, but can afford the latest trainers, 20 cigarettes per day, £20 per week on pay-as-you-go mobile and an Xbox.If the area is that deprived, how long will it be before the thing is stolen, smashed, lost or damaged? It is not the cost of the computer - laptops are about £200 and
going down in price all the time - it is the huge phone bill they will run up if they get a phone line. That is what community centres and libraries are for.

What money-wasting morons governments are. Still, there is plenty more money where that came from. Tax the workers and let the indigent play on their free PC.

B Green

Your reader Johnny is right when he talks about the poor pay in IT (Should have taken the bus, Letters blog). Last year I earned a little less than £30,000 for working on average three days per week. I have no academic qualifications, only a good number of years’ experience. I only have a basic knowledge of networks and earn my money looking after simple PCs and printers.

And yet I see adverts in your publication offering the same sort of salary but requiring various degrees or other qualifications and experience. They also ask that the candidate takes responsibility for this, that and the other, although the work, project or prospects are always exciting, which I suppose must count for something. And no, I don’t charge plumber’s rates.

Bob, submitted on the web

I have been interested to see that the information management issues discussed in Computing (Keep your data safe) tend to focus on solutions based on file servers, typically clustered to provide backup facilities.

There seems to be a large amount of disk space available for use on the many workstations on networks. My current workstation, which isn't what you'd call top of the range by any means, has an 80GB hard drive and nearly 50 per cent of its space free.

Maybe we should think about using users' hard drives as part of the solution, whether as local caches to reduce network use and increase speed, or as file server backup. While there would be a risk of any single system failing, if the same data was stored on multiple workstations it could reduce IT server costs.

Mike Raven

Nick Jones writes that his TFT monitors use less than 1W when on standby (Turn out the lights to save energy, Letters, 17 May).

I would like to know how he measured the power of his TFT. We use a wide range of make and types of computer and TFT screens, and believe I can give more realistic typical power consumptions.

My results are: TFT 40W or on standby 7W; computer at 80-100W or on standby 10W; or a voice over IP phone 7W. A typical screen and phone uses about 24W on standby for 128 hours. That is about 3.1kWh per week on standby ­ so switch it off.

Peter Howell

I run the risk of being branded a Luddite, but the Tube has for me always been a sanctuary from mobiles - certainly in central London (Mobile phone services to be tested on Tube, 15 March).
But do we know the true cost of enabling this technology for the general public in the confines of the underground? It occurs to me that all these radio frequency signals are going to be absorbed by flesh and bone - and the reflected signals too.
Will London underground be insuring itself for the future in decades to come when millions of passengers - some no doubt considering themselves high net worth - for claims that manifest themselves in the same way that smoking, asbestosis and silicosis have?
By all means test and implement a system for use by railway staff, emergency services and contractors, which hopefully would have to handle far lower volumes.
Tony Wood by email

More needs to be done to promote reuse within the UK, and the imminent WEEE Directive is the push this country needs (Vista upgrades trigger surge of e-waste, 22 February, Letters, 1 March).
The WEEE Directive is a major step forward to ensure the UK becomes a greener country, and while it is extremely worthwhile to help developing countries, we should not be too quick to ship too much hardware overseas.
If the UK has taken so long to clean up its act, how will developing countries and the charities that provide help deal with the recycling overload that will surely follow?
Terry Maguire

Timothy Gilson suggests that an easy way to avoid an upgrade to Vista and a glut of redundant hardware is to move to Linux (Vista upgrades trigger surge of e-waste, 22 February, Letters, 1 March). He says most users would notice little difference.
While I could use Open Office and a Linux email client, I would be scuppered when I tried program in VB.Net, VFP or VB6, or manage my SQL servers at work. At home my CAD package, my engine simulation software and none of my games would work.
So I cannot agree that a move to Linux would be easy. Some of us use more than just Microsoft Office on our PCs. My way of avoiding the upgrade to Vista is to stick with XP, which runs all my applications perfectly well on a four-year-old PC.
Ric Naylor

Reusing hardware in developing countries is not as green as you might think (Vista upgrades trigger surge of e-waste, 22 February). Your report contains the suggestion that by doubling the lifespan of a PC, the environmental footprint is halved. But the extended use is by people who would not otherwise have access to IT. This does not stack up.
If the extended use was by someone who would otherwise have bought a new PC that would indeed halve the environmental footprint. But if it is being used by someone who otherwise would not use a PC at all, then the only difference between reuse and non-reuse is that an additional 6,000 hours of power will be consumed in the reuse case. The PC will be discarded eventually anyway.
I am not suggesting it would be morally right to deprive developing countries of IT resources that they could obtain inexpensively. But we should not deceive ourselves that shipping old PCs abroad is good for the environment.
Good for the environment would be to extend the UK PC lifespan from the current three or four years. Who needs Vista?
Ian Troughton

Computer Aid does an excellent job in taking redundant hardware from businesses and shipping it to schools and charities in developing countries (Vista upgrades trigger surge of e-waste, 22 February), but quite rightly has minimum specifications for the equipment it can use.
This can be a disincentive for small businesses and individual users, as can the need to transport donated equipment to the organisation's premises. Under these circumstances Freecycle.org is invaluable. Conceived as a means of keeping usable products out of landfill sites, Freecycle is a worldwide network of regional Yahoo groups where members can post details of any goods they want to give away.
Interested parties respond and the donor simply selects and informs the chosen recipient who then collects the goods from the donor. The UK alone has 400 such groups and a total of over half a million members.
These groups are home to plenty of tinkerers, so the stuff does not even have to work or be intact. I have found that takers are often after a single secondary computer for home use, so it does no harm in local PR terms either.
Roger Thomas