This week’s question from Lifehacker reader Mike is something that many of us have had to deal with at one point in our lives: the irritating balance between technology, one’s personal life, and the demands of one’s professional life.

One of the more annoying situations you can encounter is a desktop or laptop that takes forever to load. It gets there eventually, but one of the surest signs that something has gone wrong is when your system takes a lot longer to boot into Windows or macOS than ever before — especially if you’re waiting minutes, not seconds, to start using your PC.

Bad weather around the corner? You may have to endure a rainy day without electronic distractions—that is, if you still want your television to turn on the following day.

There comes a time in every Windows user’s life when things start to feel slower. Perhaps you’ve been installing and uninstalling a ton of applications, or you’ve been mucking around with obscure Windows settings (or worse, the registry). Maybe you even decided to live life on the wild side, like me, and signed up for Microsoft’s Windows Insider program, which recently caused my desktop system to screech to a halt. Whoops.

Despite its browser beginnings, Chrome OS is a bonafide desktop platform, complete with snapping windows, a file system, and keyboard shortcuts. As a new Chromebook user, you can also take advantage of the vast majority of Chrome extensions, Android apps, and Linux apps.

(With a bit of finagling, you can even run some 32-bit Windows applications.)

If there's one thing I've learned from giving my friends tech-buying advice for the last decade, it's that not everyone wants to pay the premium for an Apple product - especially the laptops. The company's svelte aluminium tech is indeed capable, but the starting price for a MacBook Air is still too much for the average person. Not everyone can afford to drop serveral grand on a new piece of kit.

A premium laptop that aims to combine some of the best parts of rival machines from Apple, Microsoft and Dell, but at a lower pricepoint than any of them, the Huawei MateBook X Pro is a solid all-rounder with few compromises.

Computer security doesn't really have to be hard. Some of the smallest, simplest measures can be the most effective in keeping your devices secure — they won't take long, they're easy to do, and you don't really have any excuse for not doing them.

If you're a fan of Snapchat's filters, now you can use them places like Skype and Google Hangouts on your desktop computer. The company released a dedicated desktop app called Snap Camera this week which allows you to use the company's augmented reality selfie lenses inside other desktop apps like Skype, Google Hangouts, and Twitch.

In a recent blog post titled "Hardening macOS," Ricard Bejarano offers an extensive list of settings you can tweak to make macOS as secure as possible. It's a comprehensive list of tasks — and we love it — but it's important that you understand the "why" behind his recommendations, too. Here are a few of his top tips and explanations for why you're adjusting, installing, or modifying your Mac that way.

Laptops are uncomfortable. But you can fix that if you're willing to look just a little weird. The key is in the just a little. Today Wall Street Journal tech columnist Christopher Mims tweeted a photo of his mobile work station. Mims uses a wireless mouse, foldable keyboard and laptop stand to make an ergonomic but efficient setup when he's working at a cafe.

I don't know about you, but I'm still on the fence about Apple's Touch Bar. The most use I get out of it is accidentally tapping the virtual "back" button in my browser when trying to press a number key. That and I mainly use the Touch Bar to adjust my MacBook's brightness and volume. (Perhaps I need to configure more useful keys.)

Mac: If you're fancy enough to have a MacBook with a Touch Bar, and you don't hate that Apple replaced your physical keys with virtual ones (perhaps a blessing, given the former's quality), you may have already tried customising it a little bit.

I have a bit of reputation with my family and friends for knowing how to fix people's computer problems. When that person is in front of me, then explaining how to do that thing on Facebook or change that computer setting is pretty simple, but when I'm talking to a friend or family member across the country things get a little dicier.

Physically connecting a television to your computer is easy enough, even if you have to buy a new cable (or dongle) to go from your system to your television's HDMI input. Getting the two to play nicely be a bit of a headache, however.

Last week Dell dropped a product bomb, announcing new laptops, PCs and monitors. It was enough to make my eyes glaze over, and try to find out how much the new goodies would cost us here in Australia.

With so much focus given to making computers smaller and lighter it's good to see some larger devices that can deliver great performance and double up for work and play. The Gigabyte Aero 15 backs a great 15.6-inch display with a Core i7-7700HQ processor, with 16GB of DDR4 memory and a 512GB SSD.

So you've run out of patience with your old MacBook Pro, and have now been tempted over to the world of Windows by Microsoft's shiny new array of 2-in-1 devices. How exactly do you get started? The questions is: can you really move all of your important files over easily? Here's everything you need to know about switching from Mac to Windows.

Microsoft has reintroduced its Surface Pro hybrid device for professionals. However, this time the company is insisting that the Pro is no longer a tablet that can act as a laptop, but is instead "the most versatile laptop we've ever built".