Dear Lifehacker, We know using cheap, third-party cables to charge a smartphone is bad, but what about the little bricks that plug into the wall or nubs that plug into a car lighter? Are these safe to use or will they turn my iPhone into a ticking time bomb?

I encountered a quirky problem the other day when I was trying to clean up one of my hard drives before copying its contents to another drive: I couldn't delete a folder.

Dear Lifehacker, I have a question that has been an issue for the last 3 years. So, I'll be honest, my boyfriend and I watch porn each separately on our phones. We each have gone through each others' phone activity through Google, and when he looks at mine, there are items in there that I never Googled, like live cams chat room stuff. I have never in my life entered this into my Google search but I have a suspicion that they are pop ups from the porn sites. I want to know how and why they come up as my searches. And there are other things that show up that I supposedly googled but I know for a fact I didn't. Can you help me, please?

A reader has an issue with USB devices. Specifically, their system sometimes restarts when they plug something into a USB port. On a scale of one to "that's not good", we're a lot closer to the right side than the left, but there a few tricks they can try to hopefully get a little relief.

The first thing I do when my internet goes down is panic. I panic thinking about all the things in the world that I'll be missing out on. The viral tweets, the breaches of my privacy by Facebook and god, all those images of delicious donuts on Instagram. I imagine that's what Julian Assange thought when they cut off his internet earlier this week.

What should you do when your internet goes down to get yourself back online as quickly as possible?

Google recently released its own home voice assistant, the aptly named Google Home. It can do all kinds of interesting things, but some of its features may not work well if your home or work addresses aren't properly set up to begin with.

Bluetooth technology can be a godsend for those of us trying to minimise the amount of cord clutter in our digital lives. But when your laptop, phone, or other device is hooked up via bluetooth to a wireless speaker or pair of headphones and the audio playback starts to stutter, it can be nothing short of infuriating.

Usually, installing and uninstalling programs goes without a hitch. Considering they're the first and last steps involved in using any application, you'd hope they go smoothly. But there are times when a tool stubbornly refuses to remove itself when asked, or a Registry key has busted, prevent you from installing your favourite utility. Don't worry about a third-party app to fix things -- Microsoft has you covered.

"Bping" is another handy command-line program to add to your network troubleshooting arsenal. It works exactly like the standard "ping" utility, testing reachability by sending out a constant stream of echo packets, but with an added bonus -- sound effects.

Inevitably your computer slows down. You try to open a website and it grinds to a halt, or read an email and it churns along sluggishly. A slow computer, in many ways, is worse than a broken one -- or at least infinitely more frustrating.

Knowing the difference between HDMI and USB qualifies me as the local tech "expert", so folks often invite me around to fix their computer problems. I'll let you into a little secret though: Most of the time, I'm not doing anything all that impressive or magical. Troubleshooting basic computer problems is actually pretty straightforward.

Yesterday was Pi Day, and what better way to celebrate everyone's favourite mathematical constant than by taking a look back at everyone's favourite cheap hobbyist computer, the Raspberry Pi. Since the launch of the Raspberry Pi, I've written an absurd number of guides, blogs and an already outdated book on the variety of projects you can do with it. I've learned a lot it that time.

Is your Kindle feeling sluggish? Does it seems like it takes a little longer to change the page then it used to? That doesn't mean there's some technical problem. It means it's time to reboot it.

We highlighted Paul Vreeland's System Rescue Toolkit a few months ago, but now he's built a new, "lite" version that packs most of the same tools and can automatically run against and repair common Windows problems for you. If you liked the original, you'll love this.

Few feelings inspire more dread than a PC that refuses to start -- especially if you never bothered to back up your data. Thankfully, there are still ways to retrieve your family photos, office documents and other precious files if you know where to look. We explain what to do.

Dear Lifehacker, The other morning I switched my Samsung Galaxy S6 phone on after charging it overnight. About one minute later, it switched itself off and rebooted without me touching it. It keeps doing this -- shutting down and restarting -- over and over again until it runs out of batteries. This has rendered the phone useless. I've tried switching data/WiFi off and fiddling around with different settings but nothing seems to work. Please help!

By default, your Mac should reboot if it freezes. This is good for most of us, but that auto restart can make troubleshooting difficult for advanced users. OS X Daily shows you how to change it with a Terminal command.

Have you ever set up a new Apple device only to discover that for some reason your iMessage conversations have forked off and created multiple threads for the same person? It's an annoying and incredibly common problem, but Six Colours shows off how to fix it.

Mac: MS Office on Mac has a very weird problem. If you try to save a file with a forward slash (/) in it, it errors out. Good news though, Macworld points out that you can rename that file to fix the issue.