I remember when I was knee high to an ant, when we had to program seriously tight code to squeeze every last piece of performance out of our 4Mhz chips. Software vendors are facing enough pressures on financial turnaround to want to seriously engage this kind of responsibility especially in the games market; sharehoulders importance far outweighs the environment. And ... Microsoft ... efficient code ... you're kidding me, right?

We used to have to boot up on six clock cycles in the morning, clean the cache, flash a handful of hot GIFs, work twenty hours a day at the data centre, for two bit a month, shut down, and the janitor would short out our power supply with a bottle of Windex, if we were lucky!

Paris, 'cause she doesn't run at full wattage either. Bless the environmentally conscious, recycling friendly, multi-talented heiress.

Tickless idle is the bane of my existence. It drives guest oses mad in full up virtualization.

@Curtis: Huh? Tickless idle was first implemented (on Linux) for s390 exactly because taking ticks all the time in the guest drove the virtual machine monitor crazy (10 guests each taking 1000 interrupts per second means VMM must simulate 10,000 useless interrupts every second). Can you expand on why tickless is not working for you?

@Phil: Microsoft are a member of "Climate Savers Computing" (http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org) and have allegedly done much to make suspend/resume work better (so that people will actually use these features).