Green Computing with SCCM 20007 and Vista

The current global economy is prompting corporations to do everything possible to save money.  Employees are being asked to turn off their computers and monitors when they leave the office, but we know that for one reason or another not everyone complies with this request.  As an SCCM administrator you have a unique opportunity to make a big impact in this area.  Windows Vista comes with a command line utility called shutdown.exe.  Shutdown.exe allows you to shutdown or reboot computers, but it also allows you to hibernate Windows Vista.  Most IT departments won't shutdown user computers at night because of the possibility of losing data on some work in progress that was left open and not saved.  With hibernation, we do not have that problem.  With hibernation the computer state is saved to the hard drive and the computer is then "shutdown".  When the computer is powered on, it is returned to the same state it was before hibernating so no work in progress gets lost.  It will be very easy to use SCCM to schedule "shutdown.exe /h" (/h switch for hibernation) every night.  First we need to identify the Windows Vista Workstations using a query based collection.  The following query could be used for the collection:

select * from sms_r_system where OperatingSystemNameAndVersion like 'Microsoft Windows NT%Workstation 6.0 %'

The next thing we will need is a package.  Our package won't even need source files since shutdown.exe is already on every Vista client.  You can create a program for the package with the following command line:

%windir%\system32\shutdown.exe /h

Finally, all we need to do is advertise our package to the Windows Vista collection.  You could create a schedule for the advertisement that will run the hibernation package for example every day at 7:00 P.M.  You have full control of when is the best time to do this in your environment.  You could also get creative and use SCCM's Wake-On-Lan and awake the computers in the Windows Vista Workstations collection early every morning.  That way the end users won't even know their computers were hibernating and saving energy all night.  I would be interested if any of you implement something like this in your environment.  If you do so, please leave a comment here.