Ecobutton for laptops: how much more energy does it save? Is there a portable version?

If you follow my blog and have read these posts:

• Restoring MSI Wind U100 netbook to factory settings without external optical drive

• Ecobutton vs system standby: does the ecobutton prevail? 

you would know that I am interesting in getting a ecobutton and I own a MSI Wind U100 netbook. I considered how useful the ecobutton would be useful to use with my netbook. So I went and investigated the matter. Does it save more energy? Is there a more portable solution?

The ecobutton will work with laptops, potentially saving power, however the potential savings in power is lower than a desktop computer as laptops are already designed to use less power than a normal PC. This is because a laptop runs on a finite source of power (in order words, on battery rather than on mains power).

It is possible to only use the ecobutton software without using the ecobutton (in other words, you initiate the program from your computer instead of just pressing the ecobutton). This is good news for me, but bad news for the people who forget that your computer has a standby feature.

Good news is that the developers of the ecobutton are developing a "mini" ecobutton, a portable version of the device, which only protrudes 5mm from the the USB ports on laptops.

If you want to purchase the ecobutton, an link from amazon is below.