A colleague at work dropped her laptop and spilled coffee on it. It wouldn't turn on after that. She asked me what to do and my advice was to leave it switched off and put it on a tray full of rice and leave it for two days, hoping that it will dry out and turn on again. If it didn't take it to Bostan Mall, where there are many small shops that repair computers and laptops. Two days later, it still wouldn't turn on, so she took it to the mall. They replaced a few damaged parts in the motherboard and charged her 2800 EGP (~60 USD), which is pretty good.

I asked her about the configuration of the laptop and we had a discussion about how to make older laptops perform better and how to avoid buying new ones as the prices are insane given the continuous collapse of the EGP. My advice was to max out the RAM, replace the mechanical hard drive with an SSD, install Linux (Linux Mint is the distro I suggest as it balances ease of use with sensible defaults) and try to fix our devices when they break. This is what I did with my laptop which I bought in 2013 and still use.

This post is part of a challenge to write 150 blog posts of 150 words each this year. This is post 26 out of 150.