EDTECH Magazine recently wrote a news story about how schools are using the latest technologies to save money and increase their ROI. The following excerpt discusses Faronics Power Save and its energy and financial savings benefits.

"To reduce its energy bill, California’s Modesto City Schools installed remote power management tools that will automatically shut down the district’s PCs at night, a move that will save roughly $300,000 a year in electricity costs, says Harold Rhodes, the district’s Supervisor of Computer Systems.

It is district policy to turn off computers at day’s end, but many computers are left on all night and through the weekend. “We can tell people to turn the computers off until we’re blue in the face, and many still won’t do it,” says Stan Trevena, the district’s Director of Information and Technology Services.

In February, the district installed Faronics’ Power Save software on 6,200 PCs essentially for free through a rebate program from its power company. The IT department initially will pay $62,000 — $10 per PC — and the utility will send a full rebate once it verifies the software’s installation." Read the full story.

Faronics is proud to announce that a new version of Deep Freeze is now available—just in time to showcase to attendees of NECC 2009 and to mark the 10th birthday of Deep Freeze! Over the years Faronics' flagship system consistency software has gained a number of innovative features that have enhanced the bulletproof reboot-to-restore protection it has offered since day one. Ten years later, Deep Freeze is deployed on eight million computers and continues to help organizations do more with less by maximizing the value of their existing IT investment.

Newly released Deep Freeze v6.5 introduces several exciting features such as the ability to create multiple spaces where data can be retained over restarts. These spaces—known as ThawSpaces—can be optionally hidden to deter end-user access and tampering. A new events scheduler now provides greater flexibility in scheduling software updates, while the Enterprise Console can now remotely deploy, execute, and control software on workstations. Faronics is also happy to announce that the highly requested ability to display customizable warning messages prior to workstation maintenance events has also been added. Users can optionally be allowed to cancel any events to prevent their computing session from being disrupted. Read the full press release.

Faronics is proud to announce the release of Power Save v3.3 for Windows and v3.0 for Mac computers. Both versions introduce feature additions and enhancements to Power Save as well as tighter integration with Core Console, Faronics’ enterprise computer management tool. Core Console provides easy deployment, scheduling, and control abilities for a number of the company’s products.

Faronics was the first to bring to market a multi-platform computer energy management solution that worked on both Windows and Mac computers. Mac computers running Power Save are now able to report back to Faronics Core Console, which simplifies savings report generation in environments with both Windows and Mac versions of Power Save deployed.

Core Console can consolidate the savings from the Windows and Mac computers and generate a single report for the entire deployment. This makes it easier for organizations to measure and verify their Power Save return on investment and see the savings through one reporting system.

Power Save's reporting has also been enhanced with Energy Consumption Profiles that contain the energy consumption values for Apple's Mac computer product line. This enables Core Console to automatically detect the Mac computer type, assign the corresponding power consumption values, and generate a report using these numbers. Both these features represent evolutionary steps towards Power Save for Windows and Mac being unified under a single console, and as a testament to Faronics' commitment towards advancing the energy efficiency of Windows and Mac computers. Read the full press release.