The holiday season has always been a time for gathering -- but in recent years, it's also been a time when family and friends come bearing gifts of computer troubles. Their computer friends -- people like the Download Squad team and you, our readers -- get asked to do everything from installing RAM upgrades to the annual computer tune-up. We're happy to oblige, of course, because there's a decent chance someone will pay us in beer or baked goods. Cash is welcome too, but never seems to be offered quite as readily.

To make your holiday tech duties a bit easier, I've put together a list of some of my favorite troubleshooting apps for Windows.
Where download links for the files aren't on the application's main page, I've included a link to the appropriate download page. I've provided a handful of FileHippo links as well -- they're an excellent mirror site and they don't surround download links in advertisements or "recommendations."

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Computer benchmarking applications abound for Windows machines, but what if you want to judge the capabilities of your current Mac against one you're considering buying? Though I'm in that situation far less often than I'd prefer, when I do need to measure the relative performance of two different Macs, I turn to Xbench.

Xbench is a free performance benchmarking utility that measures the following items: CPU, Threads, Memory, Quartz Graphics (2D), OpenGL Graphics (3D), User Interface, and Disk. For a full list, including the sub-categories of what Xbench measures, check the bottom of the Xbench homepage.

When you run the app you can run all or only some of the tests, however running the entire suite only takes a few minutes. When you're done, you're presented with a report showing how your machine performed in each area.

By itself, it isn't that interesting, but if you send your report to Xbench's website using the Submit button, you can then compare it against other machines' scores.

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Lest you think blogger Long Zheng is all about Microsoft apps, our Australian friend has a keen eye on all kinds of bleeding-edge software. -- including Firefox 4. Today he noticed a change in the Firefox 4 nightly build -- sexier, semi-translucent alert dialogs, complete with a blur effect to obscure the webpage content in the background.

The new alerts fit well with Firefox 4's default Strata theme, and they definitely look nicer than those with the native Windows chrome. The blur effect is also a nice tweak, and it helps ensure your focus goes where it should when an alert box appears -- to the alert.

Download a nightly build of Firefox 4 to see the alerts in action. To test, just visit a page like this one and paste javascript:window.alert("Downloadsquad copypasta for testing shiny new Firefox 4 alerts") in your address bar and hit the enter key.

Along with pornography, it seems that online egg timers are a driving force for change and innovation on the Internet. I'm not sure there's any other way to explain the proliferation of egg timers. Granted, people may be using these timers for more than just eggs, but this burgeoning market segment never ceases to amaze and surprise me. My latest find is simply called Online Egg Timer, which is a great name for SEO.

The interface is dead-simple and very friendly, and it sports a friendly URL format as well. You can just go to www.online-eggtimer.com/90/120/240 to instantly start three timers: one for ninety seconds, one for two minutes, and one for four minutes.

Granted, the URL format could have been a tad friendlier if it allowed for other time units too, like CD allows for /2h4m15s. But Online Egg Timer does have one alarming advantage over CD: it emits a very loud ringing sound once the time is up.