I have a saying that goes something along the lines of ‘A penny saved is 1.22 pennies earned’ and while I’ll admit it’s not the catchiest of proverbs it certainly does hold some truth for the majority of us. Owing to the fact that you’re taxed on almost everything you earn, it is genuinely better to save a penny than earning an additional one and fortunately the Internet offers various methods of allowing us to do just that.
Money Saving Expert (www.moneysavingexpert.com) for example is a site that I turn to time and again to ensure that I’m always getting the best deal on my current account, credit card, utilities and so forth. As well as offering news and comparisons of various financial products on the market is also gives you a heads of to any discount vouchers or special offers valid at places such as restaurants and supermarkets which you would most likely visit anyway.
Keeping with the financial theme, I’m amazed at how many people are unaware of the various ‘cash back’ sites that are present on the Internet. One which I’ve just started using is Top Cash Back (www.topcashback.co.uk), a site which takes only a couple of minutes to sign up to before you can start earning money on purchased that you would most likely be making anyway. Top Cash back has no set up or membership fees and the idea essentially is that if you visit one of their sponsors via the site then you’ll actually get a cash reward paid straight in to your account.
There are hundreds of big name featured retailers including Play.com, Tesco, Asda, B&Q and Dell and along with the usual couple of per cent back you occasionally come across an offer which is ridiculously generous. As an example I recently signed up for O2 broadband at home which, as an existing O2 mobile customer, would usually cost me £7.50 a month for the 16mb package, including unlimited bandwidth. By going via Top Cash Back I actually got a £75 cash back bonus meaning that during the contractual year my O2 Broadband has actually only cost me £1.25 a month (£7.50 a Month x 12 Months – £75 Cashback = £15 per annum or £1.25 monthly).
The service works as retailers pay Top Cash Back to be featured with the intention that they can then accumulate more customers by also offering them rewards to buy their products. It’s only a beneficial system for the customer if they buy things they would only have purchased anyway; I also signed up to Sky HD last month which again was something I was planning to do but simply by visiting this website first I got an extra £50 straight in to my bank account. It’s just too easy!
This year's CES was dominated byproducts featuring the new 2010 Intel Core Processor family. The most outstanding member of this family by far is the Core i5, which brings high-end peformance to mainstream notebooks. We had a chance to review our first Core i5 notebook this week, and we were very impressed by the chip's ability to multitask and perform everyday chores at higher speeds than its Core 2 Duo predecessors. In addition to using Intel's 32-nanometer Nehalem architecture, Core i5 chips contain several innovative features. Hyper-threading allows the processor's two physical cores to run two threads each, dramatically improving the performance of multithreaded apps such as video editors, photo processors, spreadsheets, and high-end games. Turbo Boost allows Core i5 to increase its own clock speed, effectively overclocking itself to speed up processor-intensive tasks. And, for the first time, Intel's graphics chip and memory controller have been integrated into the processor, allowing for better power management, smaller systems, and the ability to amp up the graphics speed as needed.
