software on standby

the economist has a recent article on standby power, and how we're wasting a lot of juice from devices sitting in inefficient standby modes. I am quite guilty of leaving lights on when they probably needn't be, and often forget how much it all adds up. but I'm just one guy, and it seems like a couple lights, that's not going to make a huge difference. what annoys the hell out of me is the windows XP screensaver. screensavers are (a) meant for screens which suffer burn-in, which no one uses any more and (b) for screens which don't support some form of standby mode which is approximately none of them thanks to energystar. is it really that important for microsoft to advertise their product on billions of computers around the world by incessantly bouncing a windows logo around a dark screen? this means that the screen is fully on all the time, rather than entering a low-power standby mode. even if a user chooses to select an energy-saving option for their login session the system defaults to the xp logo screensaver at the login window, which is where most people leave their machines. many people at the lab in which I work choose to manually switch off the displays, forcing them into standby mode. this is good of them, but they shouldn't have to. it should be enough to just walk away. it's 2006. where is the progress?