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.

Microsoft held a big Surface event in Shanghai overnight. While the event was basically impossible to watch in America, with a broken liveblog and zero English livestreams, savvy viewers (and those fluent in Chinese) might have caught the big news: There's a new Surface Pro. It's been more than sixteen months since Microsoft's landmark tablet-laptop hybrid saw an update.

In the intervening time, Microsoft has seen a lot of competitors attempt to encroach on the 2-1 device space While some of those clones have been aesthetically delightful, few have approached the slick combination of design and quality the Surface Pro delivers. So a refresh is welcomed, and this year's refresh could fix some of the tablet laptop's biggest problems, even if the name is stupid.

I was so proud on Friday evening, walking out of the Microsoft Store. I'd just bought three wireless Xbox One receivers. "Finally," I thought, "those bloody cords will be gone."

Australian PC builders and desktop gaming enthusiasts will be able to buy NVIDIA’s graphics cards directly from the company, rather than only through its OEM partners, with the number one graphics chipmaker setting up an online store for customers and launching it today.

It's a sad reality that privacy comes at a premium in our data-driven world. With trackers and snoopers stalking our online movements, the only way to be sure your browsing stays confidential is to invest in the right software, and that's where Disconnect comes in.

Building a computer processor from scratch isn't for the faint of heart, but for those with the knowledge and willpower it can be incredibly fun and educational. Keen to have a crack themselves, Eric Schlaepfer and Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories spent two years making a large scale (and prettier) version of the humble MOS 6502 microprocessor.

Video: In the age of Siri, we take for granted how far speech recognition technology has come. But a quick glance back at 1986, when IBM introduced its voice recognition software, shows that we've travelled light years since the earliest version of this game-changing software. And it's even more fun in satire form.

Humans aren't nearly as creative as we think. Craft brewers, for example, have run out of fun names and are sending each other cease and desist letters for coming up with the same ideas. So, what if we let computers come up with new names for us?

Google always uses its annual I/O developer conference as a place to trot out some of its biggest and most exciting product updates. You'd be forgiven for feeling like this year was kind of a dud. There were no new gadgets, no new moonshot projects, and not even cool new swag like Google Cardboard headsets. The keynote was essentially just a boring two-hour lecture about small, incremental updates to existing products.

AI-powered software that can automatically colourise old black and white photos exists, but it's often far from perfect. In comparison, manually colourising an image in Photoshop yields stunning results, if you have a lot of time and impressive skills. But a new app, developed at the University of California at Berkeley, cleverly merges both approaches so it's easy to accurately colourise a black and white pic.

Smart home technology has found its way in many of today's households, meaning it's time to learn to code for this booming platform. With the Amazon Alexa Coding Bundle, you can capitalize on the success of Amazon's smart home tech by building your own voice-activated applications.

A terabyte isn't cool, you know what's cool? A petabyte. And companies like DigitalGlobe are creating more of them than they can upload to the cloud. That's why Jeff Bezos has a service for shipping huge amounts of data via traditional roadways.

NVIDIA has pushed out the GTX 1080 Ti and lately we've seen the launch of the RX 500 series cards.

But it's really AMD's Vega GPUs that people have been holding out for. Earlier this morning the company confirmed it would start shipping the first Vega GPUs - although not the consumer cards people are expecting - from the end of next month - and as an added bonus, there's a new 16 core CPU to boot.

Never underestimate the power of cloud storage, especially when Zoolz is involved. With Zoolz Dual Cloud Storage, you can bolster your data storage needs with a whopping terabyte of cloud storage that lasts a lifetime.

And in a week where the world is grappling with the consequences of just how vulnerable computers are is this joyous nugget of news: more Australians are using Windows XP than Windows 8.1, even though support for the former was officially canned years ago.

Laptops coming with bloatware is a huge pain in the arse as it is, but matters get a thousand times worse when that bloat compromises security. It happened to Lenovo more than once, and now it's happened to HP.

One of the most popular forms of development is mobile app dev — and when you know how to build apps for Android, the world's most popular mobile platform, you can set yourself up with a pretty comfortable place in the job market. Thanks to the Professional Android Developer Bundle, you can start learning all the ins and outs of Android today.

At Microsoft's Build conference, the dorkiest of companies put on a big show, complete with fog machines and fancy lights, in order to show it's a cool competitor to Apple and Google. The speakers who came on stage during keynotes had stylish hair. "Do they have dressers backstage?" an attendee asked a group of us when it was all over.

At least tens of thousands, if not millions of medical records of New York patients were until recently readily accessible online to just about anyone who knew how to look.