AC> I use WindowMaker here. Very light-weight...

 I tried that, and it worked well, but I didn't like its approach.
I'm using Sawfish as the manager with Gnome on top. Sawfish is fast
too.

AC> I imagine/hope it'd draw less than 100W with the monitor turned
AC> off. With any luck the hard disk will power down too when it's
AC> not doing anything, although I'm not sure about the longevity
AC> of hard disks powering up and down all the time, so I let mine
AC> spin continuously (for years). 

 (grin) Me too. I've lost four hard drives over the years, and they
always fail when they spin up. The idea of spinning them up and down
ten times a day does not appeal to me at all.

 I have no idea what a computer would use just sitting there (your
100W maximum guess sounds about right). The problem is that a
switch-mode power supply only draws current on the peak of the 50Hz
sinewave in a short pulse, and I have no idea what the electricity
meter out the front of the house makes of that.

 I can measure RMS, peak, phase, or anything else, but the "power"
meter is an induction motor with a counter on the end. What the hell
does it measure?

 I did some work on power factor correction in SMPS a few years back,
and it was a farce! How do you correct a pulse 10% wide?

Regards,
Bob
   

--- BQWK Alpha 0.5