saves

The stock market may be showing signs of a rebound, but consumers still have a lock on their wallets at retail.

Shopping online for the right products at better prices can be quite overwhelming, but with some know-how, it's less intimidating and certainly worthwhile. These 12 tools will not only help you save cash, but they might also make you more confident about your purchases. I am.

Frucall: Frucall is a really great service. When you're at a brick-and-mortar store checking out a product, you can either call Frucall's free telephone line, text-message the company, or access its mobile site and compare the store's price with online pricing. When you input the name or bar code, it returns the pricing on the product from Amazon.com, Shopping.com, and other services. It's quick and easy. Plus, it's free, though standard text-messaging rates do apply. I really liked Frucall.

Google Product Search: Formerly known as Froogle, Google's Product Search is a relatively useful tool for finding cheaper prices on desired products. It will return a good portion of the online stores currently selling products that match up with your search terms. It also lists their seller ratings, based on customer reports. It's a nice tool, but it doesn't quite stand up to some of the more useful sites in this roundup. Consider Google Product Search a backup.… Read more

Note taking is an important aspect to many computer users' lives. A program needs to be quick, efficient, and only visible when needed. Notez claims to be all of those things and more for the modern note maker, but we found its features to be fairly standard.

This freeware embeds itself into your tray for quick access. The note's interface is that of a traditional yellow sticky note with a few buttons and a scrolling bar at the top. The note can quickly and easily be written in the body of the sticky. The buttons are a bit surprising: … Read more

If you've ever seen a Flash image online and wanted to capture it, your time has come. EZ Save Flash offers users an opportunity to save these simple moving images and recall them with ease.

This program focuses on the job at hand and offers virtually no display. There is a small floppy disk icon that appears on your Internet browser, but users do not even need it. Its interface is quite simple: by right-clicking on a Flash image a short list of options appears on screen. Users can play with the loop by speeding it up, rewinding, and … Read more

Earth Day may or may not appeal to your eco-conscience, but keeping the reins steady on your computer's carbon footprint and energy consumption makes good technological and financial sense. Reducing your energy output can prolong the life of your hardware--especially a laptop or Netbook--and can help save cash, which we all know is the 'greenest' motivation around.

This collection of environmentally friendly software lassos together these apps, plus a few others to help understand and appreciate our planet's cities, flora, and outer space neighbors.

ENERGY-SAVERS

Edison

Edison for XP and Windows Vista is the newest one-stop app for monitoring how much energy and money you save when you tighten up your computer's sleep and shutdown schedules. A slider lets you decide after how many minutes you want to shut down your computer's display and hard drive during the peak work day. You can program differing criteria for off hours. Manual customization is also possible if you need to ease into greener computing.… Read more

Personal savings site BillShrink has a new feature: a gasoline pricing database that directs you to gas stations based on the route you take on your daily commute, not just how close you are to the stations.

The Web app isn't just for finding prices. It actually helps you plan your refueling stops along the way. You start by telling it about your car and its mileage, and your home and work addresses. You get back a results page that shows you a Google Map of all the gas stations along your route. You can zoom in and out … Read more

We can't keep you from getting pinched if you've neglected to deck yourself in verdant hues this St. Patrick's Day, but we can help keep you in the spirit of green with these energy-saving apps. Of course, we'd never tease you so mercilessly with a collection of "green apps" without also pointing out our jolly supply of leprechaun and other St. Patrick's Day screensavers. Without further ado, make merry with these eco-minded downloads.

Edison for XP and Windows Vista is the newest one-stop app for monitoring how much energy and money you save … Read more

Daylight-saving time really messes with the guys of The 404. Today, we realize how old we are when compacts discs are 30 years old. Obviously, teens prefer MP3s over CDs; audiophiles die a little. Another teen creates Muziic, a program that lets you build a music library from YouTube. And finally, Walgreens starts to sell sex toys.

With music, pictures and now your documents living online, it's not going to be long before your pr0n collection moves there. Justin feels pretty compelled to write guidelines on how to do this. As a matter of fact, he's become quite the expert on how to do it in your \System32\ folder on your Windows partitioned, disguised as a temporary cache.

Congratulations to Elizabeth for winning a copy of House of the Dead: Overlord for the Nintendo Wii. Right now, "The Nerdy Dirty" is leading our contest for a 404 motto, but we're waiting to see what our community comes up with the phrase "Not found." As always, call in at 1-866-404-CNET (2638). Or send us an e-mail at the404 [at] cnet [dot] com. We've got more giveaways coming up--I know, it sounds like we're bribing you, but you gotta do what you gotta do to get those listeners.

Remember that month in 2007 when everybody was talking about the Daylight Savings changes? You do? Well, so did Microsoft, which is why they released updates to address the changes. Now, if you're running an older system without the benefit of Automatic Updates, or if you just like to stay "off the grid," there's this handy tool to ensure your aging or isolated system doesn't spring forward too late, or fall back too early.

This is the simplest of tools. There's no installation--just run the downloaded file. There are only two buttons, so even … Read more

Every day that we eke out our survival we know that there is some actuary or scientist working out whether it's worth us ever trying.

Professor Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist from Harvard, punched in a few numbers, posited a couple of suppositions, and declared that two Google searches generate as much CO2 as boiling a kettle.

You would, I hope, not expect me to spout the numbers at you, but apparently the fact that Google transmits every search inquiry to more than one server doesn't help. And, worse, even though Google believes it is the most efficient of … Read more