Many of us are struggling to get a grip on our financial lives.  A lot of us don't know which accounts have what in them, what bills are due on what days, or what credit cards have the highest balances.  Getting a grip on your financial life doesn't have to be a strain.  There are utilities out there that can provide you real time information about your financial picture without having to worry about waiting for statements or miscalculating something in a spreadsheet.  The best part about all of this is that these two utilities I am going to introduce to you today is that they are completely free.

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Personally, I have never really been a fan of Apple products.  That doesn't mean they don't have their place in the world, it just means they aren't for me.  However, when one of the most influential people in technology passes, we ALL mourn the loss.  Whether we are PC, Mac, Linux, etc, we can all recognize and appreciate what Steve Jobs has done in our industry.  Steve, this one's for you...

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We, at computingondemand.com, had been looking for a way to benchmark a NAS in a repeatable form without the need to buy additional software.  For us, we had been performing a test in our NAS reviews that benchmarks the speed at which you can transfer the Avatar ISO to and from a NAS.  This was a drag and drop process that proved to be a hassle to run more than one time.  It was even more of a hassle waiting for the test to near completion to document the transfer speed at that time, and then average the results.  Because of this, I created a simple batch file that can perform the test repeatedly and calculate the results, allowing me to walk away while the test was running and perform other duties.  Now, I am releasing this repeatable test to our readers so they can directly compare the results they get with ours. (more...)

Recently, Google introduced their own DNS service for internet customers.  With the latest iteration of their service, along with OpenDNS and a few other DNS Service providers, they have started to use CDN's (Content Delivery Network) to increase performance.  This helps latency issues that your ISP is typically unable to address by gathering and using data stored on DNS servers based on the requestor's location.

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If some of you are new to the website thing; you have a lot to learn, but don't be overwhelmed by it all.  One of the applications that is going to be a help for you to understand where some of of your traffic is coming from or doing on your site is Google Analytics.  If you are new to analytics, there will be some confusion as to what is what.  We will try to demystify some of the confusion new users have with the application.

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If your company is ready to bring an IT project live, you may be missing more pieces than you think.  It is too often the case that Information Technology evolves within the organization faster than the organization may be ready for it and as an IT enthusiast/specialist; my eyes have been opened recently when rolling out a new initiative.

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I have been in the IT environment for all of my adult life and with that, I have heard countless organizations claim that they can revolutionize the way companies do business.  To this day, there have only been a few companies that have really changed the way they do business that can directly change the way their customers do business.  Even less often is a company that sells you something that your organization can learn from itself and become a better business; not by implementing their solution, but by learning about the development of the solution itself.

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I really had high hopes for the latest version of Firefox, so much so that I sat and dealt with the same problems from the previous version waiting for an update to fix it.  Firefox has come a long way since it debuted, but sometimes that road ahead can actually lead you backwards.  With the slurry of new features present in Firefox 4, and even 3 for that matter, the project has failed to address one of the most problematic issues, memory usage.

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I have had an annoying problem that I just realized I had.  Sometimes, when I am quick clicking through websites or testing on this one, I tend to hit some buttons rather quickly.  Sometimes, they close my windows and other times have no effect.  Well, one time, I accidentally zoomed in on this site with Firefox and never realized that I did so. (more...)

I recently had an interesting argument with one of my friends about Power Supplies.  Our argument was about cooling fan size and placement within the power supply.  His argument was that a larger fan is better than a smaller fan.  As enthusiast, we have seen both employed, but for some reason, no standard has been defined.  Are Power supply companies just playing into the idea that bigger fans are better for cooling? Needless to say, this sparked some interest in research. (more...)