About

A friend was about to take a laptop to the tip. It was slow, it ran hot, and it had reached the age where everyone assumes the answer is a new one.

It was not broken. It had been neglected, then declared out of date, and those are two different things that get treated as one.

I took it apart on the kitchen table. The fans were packed with dust and the thermal paste had gone hard, so the machine was slowing itself down to avoid cooking. A clean-out, fresh paste, a £43 solid state drive and a £20 battery, then Linux, because the Windows it wanted was no longer an option. Sixty three pounds and an evening. It has done email, browsing and word processing ever since.

The Digital Repair Café does the same thing in public: a free pop-up repair café in Milton Keynes where you fix your own laptop or desktop, with someone patient sitting beside you.

Why I am doing this

I have worked in and around IT since I started my first creative agency in Germany in the 1990s, and almost none of it was taught to me. I learned by taking things apart, and by asking people who met the question with patience rather than a sigh. I would like to put that back.

My day job, be braver now, is looking after the digital side of small businesses. There is no shortage of demand for this, only a shortage of places to take the question.

Who it is for

The young get assumed to be good at this because they grew up holding a phone, which teaches you nothing about a laptop. The old get assumed to be past helping, which is insulting and untrue. Both are welcome, and so is anyone who finds it hardest to get help at all: people from disadvantaged backgrounds, people with mental health conditions, and neurodiverse people.

If what is stopping you is the thought of looking daft in a room full of people who do this for a living, that is exactly who the café is for. No question is too basic, and the people who ask the basic ones are the ones who go home understanding how it works.

What happens at a session

A row of tables. A laptop with its back off and its screws in a little pot so they cannot roll away. Someone sitting beside you with their hands in their lap, while yours are the ones inside the machine.

Bring a laptop or a desktop if you have one, but you do not have to: there are machines of our own on the bench with the covers off for anyone who turns up empty-handed. We cannot repair phones or tablets, though bring your questions about them. You do the work and we show you how, so you can do it again without us. If it is past saving, we will help you recycle it properly.

Nobody is selling you anything and there is nothing to pay.

Before you buy a new one

Find out what is wrong with the one you have. Usually it is dust, a tired drive, a dead battery or software that has outgrown the hardware, and all four cost less to fix than a weekly shop.

The next session is being organised now. Get the newsletter to hear when and where it is.

Axel Segebrecht, founder