Retailers’ love affair with mail-in rebates may be coming to an end.

In response to customer complaints, Best Buy Co. Inc., the world’s largest electronics retailer, promised Friday to eliminate mail-in rebates within two years. Best Buy’s rivals, including Circuit City Stores and CompUSA, are expected to follow suit.

“Our customers are telling us they just hate the process,” said Ron Boire, executive vice president and general merchandise manager at Best Buy.

But it wasn’t immediately clear Friday whether Best Buy would pass on the eliminated rebates in the form of lower prices, though several industry watchers said they expect the company to do so.

Source: startribune.com

Windows XP comes with a lot of great accessories, but as we all know we can always use some more. For this Microsoft provided free of charge a set of small applications that will enhance the way we use Windows.

This set of applications is called Power Toys. PowerToys are additional programs that developers work on after a product has been released to manufacturing. They add fun and functionality to the Windows experience.

These applications consist of the following:

• ClearType Tuner
  This PowerToy lets you use ClearType technology to make it easier to read text on your screen, and installs in the Control Panel for easy access.
• HTML Slide Show Wizard
  This wizard helps you create an HTML slide show of your digital pictures, ready to place on your Web site.
• Open Command Window Here
  This PowerToy adds an “Open Command Window Here” context menu option on file system folders, giving you a quick way to open a command window (cmd.exe) pointing at the selected folder.
• Alt-Tab Replacement
  With this PowerToy, in addition to seeing the icon of the application window you are switching to, you will also see a preview of the page. This helps particularly when multiple sessions of an application are open.
• Tweak UI
  This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more.
  Version 2.10 requires Windows XP Service Pack 1 or Windows Server 2003.
• Power Calculator
  With this PowerToy you can graph and evaluate functions as well as perform many different types of conversions.
• Image Resizer
  This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.
• CD Slide Show Generator
  With this PowerToy you can view images burned to a CD as a slide show. The Generator works downlevel on Windows 9x machines as well.
• Virtual Desktop Manager
  Manage up to four desktops from the Windows taskbar with this PowerToy.
• Taskbar Magnifier
  Use this PowerToy to magnify part of the screen from the taskbar.
• Webcam Timershot
  This PowerToy lets you take pictures at specified time intervals from a Webcam connected to your computer and save them to a location that you designate.

You can download and install each one separately. Power Toys can be found and downloaded Here