Decide what to buy | the Reevoo.com blog, featuring news on TVs, cameras, laptops, mp3 players & other gadgets, shopping tips and deals, reviews and more

When buying a new computer, whether it be a laptop or desktop, there are a lot of numbers to consider: how much memory it has to run software, how much storage space it has for your files and even how much room it’ll take up on your desk. One that’s only become something to consider in the last few years is how many cores the processor has.

The processor sits at the heart of your computer and does all the number-crunching that makes everything else possible, from writing a letter to listening to music; it used be the case that you just needed to pay attention to how fast it was: how many gigahertz (or going back further, megahertz) did it run at?

Whilst it may have looked like your computer was doing lots of different things at once (loading a web page & playing a music file), with a single core it was actually doing things one at a time, switching rapidly back and forth between different tasks to provide a (hopefully) seamless experience of each thing you needed it to do. If you wanted to do more things more quickly you needed to increase the speed of the processor.

Multi-core processors provide a different way to speed things up. Instead of making one processor core work faster, you split the work between 2 or more. You could think of it like the old school maths problem: if it takes 1 painter 1 hour to paint 1 wall, how long will it take 2 painters to paint the same wall?

Unfortunately, this doesn’t automatically mean that a dual-core 2GHz processor will run at 4GHz. Software has to be written in a special way to enable it to split the work up and make the most of multiple cores; if you want your wall painted twice as fast, you have to make sure that both painters are going to turn up and know the most efficient way to divide up the wall between them! The good news is that as multi-core processors have become so common, more and more software is being designed to take advantage of them, so your computer can paint more walls, more quickly!

We’ve got some great products in this week’s Green Piece. The first one will save you money on your water and electricity and it will help to save the planet too. It’s a shower head with a difference. The Oxygenics BodySpa Water Saving Shower Head, as well as saving water, also works as a mini spa treatment in your own home. It uses a narrow channel in the shower head to squeeze all of the water out. This squeezing causes negative pressure which sucks air into the shower head. Then the air mixes with the water and creates a lovely invigorating shower.

You save on water because less is allowed through the narrow channel. You also don’t have to worry that you’ll have a rubbish shower because the air and the extra pressure makes it seem more powerful than your ordinary shower. Less water also means less heat to warm it up so you save on heating too. Bonus. There’s also no need to worry if you’re in a hard-water area as the inside of the shower head are made of high-tech, corrosion-resistant plastic with an extremely smooth surface that prevents the build-up of lime scale. Did they think of everything or what?

The only thing to note is that it won’t work with low pressure water systems e.g. Electric or Venturi Showers. If you’re up on your shower speak, you’ll need minimum water pressure of 20psi (that’s pound per square inch). You can pick one up for £39.95 from Green Warehouse.

The next handy device is called an Ecobutton and it attaches to your computer with a USB cable. Every time you have a break to make tea, pop to the loo or answer the phone, you just press the Ecobutton and it will power-down your computer for you.

According to the guys over at Nigel’s Eco Store, when your average computer goes on standby automatically, it’s programmed to use a ‘level 1’ standby which means that it still uses 50 per cent of the energy. Apparently the Ecobutton saves even more energy by using a ‘level 3’ standby. They estimate it’ll save you around £50 and 135kg of carbon a year.

Last but not least is the Eco Stapler. This is a stapler…without staples. This neat little device will perform some cutting and folding magic in the same time as it takes you to operate a normal stapler. Waste online  say that “If everyone in UK offices saved just one staple a day, we’d save 72 tonnes of metal a year”. Not bad for a £4.99 product. You can only staple three pages at a time, mind. So if you’re planning on producing a document that will easily take out a few trees, I’d suggest using a proper stapler or more importantly, ask yourself if you really need to use that much paper.