I bet this software costs an awful lot to license!

And I never understood why people want this when a PC can be shutdown/put into S3 sleep by a scheduled task then powered back on by the BIOS/a WOL magic packet.

"The installation of NightWatchman will reduce our electricity bill by tens of thousands of pounds and, vitally, it will reduce our carbon emissions by 147 tonnes"

Ho ho ho. Who's he trying to kid? It'll reduce their carbon emissions, and, VITALLY, reduce their leccy bill. I doubt very much it's about carbon - rather about their huge power bills.

Because scheduled tasks are a pain to administrate. We use psshutdown (in conjunction with psexec if I remember correctly from the last time I looked at the script) from the pstools package executed by one of the DC's in its spare time at night followed by a magic packet in the morning to bring everything back around - and I'll bet that if you look under the hood of the package, you find a fancy psshutdown frontend. All in all, it took one admin an 8 hour day to write all the code (VBscript and some C# to do fancy automation tasks in a much quicker fashion than VBscript alone does) and we did a limited test the very night it was proposed.

Thing is, these things are always sold by vendors directly to executive management - who proceeds to tell IT "We're buying it" and nobody in IT gives enough of a shit about the business to propose the obvious, free solution.

We use a simple cron job at the school I work for. It runs through the IP addresses used by classroom type PCs running the Samba "net rpc shutdown" command (I think that's the command). It does this at 9pm each day.

As for turning back on... We just leave students to press the power button and wait a few minutes. They all know where the power button is, and 2-5 minutes waiting teaches them a bit of patience (OK, it probably just annoys the "I want it now" generation, but I don't care).

You could just tell your staff to switch there computors off at the end of the day! It works in Office.

Yes, not everyone dose it to start with, but a few weeks gental naging and they soon remember.

Its a bit like the NASA Pen/ Russan Pencil Tail.

We did this for the Uni O worked for about 7 years ago. PCs would kick the users off at 10 past 10 at night (should have gone home 10 mins before) and re-ghost the pc's before systematically shutting them down to be woken up the next morning by the students.

All in all the whole thing worked really well and yes, it saves a LOT of money :)

If they save this much power by switching off PCs atnight - how much more could they save by moving to 4W thin client devices?!

... not to mention the savings in maintaining, replacing and decommisioning old PCs whenever an OS/software upgrade is needed?!

Why are people so stuck in this cultural rut of a desktop-per-desk?