In general, most Chromebooks (especially modern ones) are whisper-quiet. So it can be a little surprising to hear the fans on your laptop spin up. In particular when there's no obvious reason for it. The good news is that sometimes a laptop needs extra cooling and it doesn't mean something is wrong. In some cases, you do however need to do something about it.

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking a Chromebook is "simple" and is only suitable for kids at school, not serious work. Yet, ChromeOS has grown into a rather mature operating system, and there are plenty of features that can supercharge your productivity or expand your options hidden under the surface of that user-friendly interface.

As the price of memory continues to skyrocket, and games become more and more demanding, it's fair to ask how much the RAM on your GPU actually matters. What's the right quantity? What about speed and bandwidth? If you're wondering what to decide when it comes to your next GPU's RAM, it's time to have the talk.

Chromebooks have come a long, long way since I first used one. It helps that so much of what we do every day happens in a browser, so, in a way, we've met Chromebooks halfway. Either way, it's entirely possible to use a Chromebook as your only computer. The question is, what are you giving up by doing so?

Chromebooks have a good reputation for being low-maintenance computers with solid security and privacy. By and large, this is true. It's why we trust them for use by children and college students, or why some companies like to issue them to employees who only need a basic computer.

On balance, USB-C has been pretty great. I would be the last person to suggest that we should go back to the bad old days of USB-A (insofar as we've actually left it) or, even worse, micro-USB.

Power banks are the easiest gadget to neglect. You charge them, stick them in a drawer and then only pull them out when you need to travel or when the power's out. Which is why it's easy to miss when your power banks are outdated or no longer suitable to have your back when you need them most.

My parents owned a station wagon only very briefly when I was a child, but I'll never forget how awesome it was to hang out in the back of that wood-paneled beauty with the seats folded down. It made long trips a breeze, and I was sad to see it go.

Driving used to be something more than just a way to get from one place to another. Just taking a drive down to the store could be an exciting experience in the right car. The so-called "driver's car", which emphasizes feedback and responsiveness to your inputs was a great way to forget about your dull 9-5 life. For those who cared about such things, there were plenty of choices at every budget level. These days? I'm starting to doubt that a true driver's car even exists anymore in any form.

It's the start of the festive season, and so people are unpacking their trees, putting up lights, and doing the same old Christmas decoration thing as last year, and the year before that.

Corruption is bad in any walk of life, but you certainly don't want it in your computer. Yet when your apps aren't working correctly, or Windows seems to just crash for no reason, there's a good chance file corruption is the culprit.

The first time I gave money to a Linux project felt weird. I'd been playing with one distro or another for a while, never quite figuring it out. Then Ubuntu Linux launched just as I started college, and because we all had bad internet, they sent me an installation disc for free.

The numbers on Linux installations are finally starting to show some life, and despite what some people might say, it's not all down to just one or two major moves. But, undeniably, the rise of Linux gaming has something to do with it.

All of my most recent wireless keyboards have built-in lithium batteries. At first, this seemed like a step-up, but it turns out that when we're talking about peripherals, there are plenty of reasons to prefer good old removable AA batteries.

SUVs and crossover vehicles might look like the same thing at first glance, but in most cases those similarities are only skin deep. Both SUVs and crossovers vehicles have become immensely popular, but you should make sure you're getting the vehicle type with the attributes you need.

You charged your laptop to 100% last night, closed the lid, and put it in your bag. However, when you take it out the next day to get started on your work (or browse the web) it won't turn on—the battery is dead!

Another year, another long list of changes to Windows that "nudge" you into making choices or adopting behaviors that aren't in your interest. At some point, it really feels like Windows stopped existing to make the actual users of PCs happier, and now serve a different master. I think these changes are the most worrying.

You've heard that the world's infrastructure runs on Linux, and how important Free and Open Source (FOSS) software is to just about all the technology we enjoy every day, but there are some (to bring out the old cliché) unsung heroes of FOSS without which your stuff just wouldn't work—and you should at least know their names.

For the longest time, smartphone battery life was a real issue. I remember my first few smartphones basically traveling with me from charger to charger. They would charge at my desk, charge in my car, and charge next to my couch. While phone battery life is now much better, the real revolution has come from fast-charging.

So you buy a Kindle and you think to yourself, "I sure would like to turn the pages from way over here, surely there's a solution for that?" Well, to my personal surprise, I have recently learned both that people who want to turn eReader pages at a distance exist (it makes sense when you think about it) and that Kindles in particular have no elegant way of achieving this goal. Hence, the existence of weird and wacky "Kindle page turners."