Power management vendor Verdiem has updated its Surveyor tools that help users regulate energy consumption by Windows-based PCs with features that solve "PC insomnia" and that automatically close open applications.

While most users think of power management as a data center issue, Surveyor 5.0 is a centralized console administrators use to control power settings across groups of PCs and laptops or individual desktops. The software supports Vista, XP and Windows 2000.

The "insomnia" feature recognizes conflicts within the PC environment that prevent a computer from going to sleep, solves those issues and puts the PC into a low-power setting. The feature uses its own timer to define idle time on the desktop.

The new version controls a wider array of power management and group policy settings, allows administrators to separate laptops out as a specific sub-group, provides fine-tune features for settings across remote desktops and supports a remote wake-up capability called Wake-on-Web.

"The data center gets a lot of press for needing to be green, but the PC monitor challenge is almost twice as big," says Matt Heinz, senior director of marketing for Verdiem. "There is opportunity to expand across the enterprise; you have servers, printers, telephony. As devices become intelligent enough to be put into a low-power state there will be more opportunities to leverage power management."

Surveyor is priced starting at US$25 per user.