Updated November 2023

You’re more reliant on technology in Mexico. When you live in another country, your life depends more on technology than it does at home, if that is even possible. Skype, Facebook, Whatsapp, FaceTime, Netflix and entertainment and streaming help make being an expat or foreign resident feel more like you’re a person with a very long commute rather than living in a foreign country. At times, that’s what you want, a day spent just like you would at home.

Then one day, your lifeline goes blinky on you. You panic. Rightfully so because you are now embarking on a journey and a saga, a juncture where cultures collide, exposing the electronic beating heart of your cross-border existence. You got a laptop problem.

A quiz

Think you are ready to come to Mexico with your laptop for work or play?  Test your knowledge.

Question: You are living in Mexico (somewhere you can hear the surf all day) and your computer starts behaving oddly. Blue screens. Tabs in Google Docs that shut rather than open when you click them, and finally your laptop freezes up entirely. You re-boot, nothing.

You (choose one of the following):

1. Walk it right over to the Mexican equivalent of Best Buy and explain the problem or have a Mexican explain the problem for you.

2. Call Jesus, your computer guy, to come over and make it right and struggle through the Language barrier.

3. Call your American friend, the one that knows about this stuff.

4. Try to fix it yourself, comfortable in the knowledge that if it’s really serious, you can always buy a new laptop. (You can solve any problem if you throw enough money at it).

5. Pull out the extra laptop you brought. You had so much extra space in your suitcase when you left for your eight-month stay in a foreign country that you thought, why not?

The answer is #5

Don’ hire expat technicians!

In some ridiculous twist of logic, some expats/residents won’t have anything serviced, cars, teeth or computers, by someone who doesn’t speak English. Knowing this, expats who "like to tinker" put up computer repair shingles. One look at their websites should tell you that is a no-go. You have a decision to make.

Stick with the Mexicans. They not only taught themselves how to repair computers, they learned how to do it with tools printed largely in English.  

However, challenges still lie ahead. At home in Denver, my computer technician, Vasif, can fix hardware problems, software problems, internet connection problems, virus infections or security issues. He can even tell me why my printer isn't working (again). In Mexico, different computer techs specialize in specific problems. You have to match the right computer technician with your problem.

Like wild turkeys in tall grass, one has to hunt down technicians who are also working as cab drivers, teenage sons of friends, and college students as well as people with store front repair services (Having several wildly unrelated jobs; the cab driver/farmer, the therapist/administrative assistant, the attorney/language teacher is inherent in the culture).

Those technicians that do have storefronts often have laissez-faire schedules. Did I say schedules? Don’t you have to keep those? Okay then, maybe not a schedule. They may answer their business phone, or not. They may be there when you come with your laptop, or not. They may have e-mail (but likely never look at it). They rarely have a website and if they do, they don’t check their mail. Social dictates in Mexico don’t require returning messages and at times Mexicans forget the distinction, understandable since every interaction they have is social.

However, once you stalk and bring down your prey, they will come to your home smiling and gracious and charge a third of what you pay at home.

Start getting names of such people the day your plane lands and keep all of them on speed dial. Only 1 out of 5 will return your call in bad Spanish. Finding a computer technician is often a matter of knowing someone who knows someone. Begin your quest early and don’t stop until you have at least 4-5 names.

Most Mexican stores, from pharmacies to office supply stores don’t carry deep inventory. Same thing goes for the computer repair stores. Ask around for the best ones. Uber drivers are a good place to start.

When you do get your computer back from a technician, changing the language settings back to English may not be as simple as you think.  It’s pretty scary when the setting instructions on how to reset them are in Spanish too. But still, stick with the natives.

A sampling of other computer-related issues to consider

Chargers in stores are off-brands and unreliable

Imagine what happens when you don’t have the right charger for a crucial piece of equipment? My town in Mexico is about the size of Richmond, Virginia and I can’t find a new charger made by Apple for my IPhone. I had to resort to off-brands. The charger boxes say the chargers I have bought are Apple compatible. My phone warns me otherwise when I plug in the after-market charger. Whatever part you need might take time, if you can get the part at all. Amazon.mx doesn’t have near as deep inventory as Amazon.com. (You can’t use your American credit card on Amazon.mx. You will need a Wise Card.)

A malfunctioning keyboard is more of disaster than you think.

After four months in Mexico, four keys on my Hewlett Packard laptop keyboard went bad three months after the warranty ended.  The wireless function also ceased to operate. Keyboards are not something most technicians can fix. It has to go back to the factory.

First I calculated the cost of a trip to Arizona 11 hours away for a new laptop. Buying a new laptop in Culiacan, Mexico, two hours away was cheaper, so I caught a ride with a friend making a trip to the Costco there, where they had a fairly good selection.

That the keyboards would, understandably, be in Spanish in Mexico somehow escaped me. At first, I was totally jazzed thinking I’d have a Spanish keyboard equipped with the letter “n” with a tilde and an upside down question mark. 

My enthusiasm dampened considerably when I learned that Spanish keyboards don’t have the same functions as ours do. For example, shift+letter does not produce a capital letter. Number keys have three functions. This will be the case with any laptop you buy from Amazon.mx as well of course. The keyboard is in Spanish.

You have to learn how to type again and none of those instruction manuals Google pulls up are in English. I still haven’t learned how to do the upside question mark that would be so cool to have. When did you say that report was due?

My answer was using two keyboards rather than buy a new laptop. I had cords everywhere: A Mexican Solution to call my very own.

Your technical problem solving skills will improve exponentially in Mexico.

Apple, Microsoft, and most other corporate selling-machines totally abdicated responsibility for training us in how to use their products, leaving us with crowd- sourced forums, a virtual fire hose of non-curated information that takes hours to scroll through, thus leaving us helpless in the hands of polite 12-year-olds on YouTube.

Although taxing and time consuming, at least we have those tools to diagnose problems rather that subject ourselves to outright humiliation. Remember the good old days when you had to call the eye-rolling, chain-smoking IT guy in your company when something went wrong? No question is too dumb for Google and at least you can pose it in total privacy.

The answer

The correct answer to the question at the beginning of the post, “What to do if your computer goes out? is # 5. Out of the seven years I’ve come to Mexico part-time, I have been terribly grateful to have my old laptop for four of them.

The smartest thing I ever did was leave my 20-old laptop here in Mexico as a back up. That way, work still gets done while I chase people down or research a technical problem. Without my creaky old Toshiba, I would have missed weeks of productivity and thrown money at my computer problems like Croesus.

Americans replace their laptops every 3-5 years.  Surely you have an old one lying around. When you plan your trip to Mexico, ask yourself, what would I do if I lost my laptop? Could I survive? Would it be a disaster, or could I get by with my phone and tablet?

If you are planning extended stays in Mexico or Latin America, leave the extra pair of cargo shorts or paperback novels at home. Bring the old laptop - your back-up beating heart.

Related Links:

A great vocabulary list for talking about your computer with a Mexican consultant - Spanish Language Blog

Next up - The tips to maintaining your property in a coastal zone 

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About the author:

Kerry Baker is a partner with Ventanas Mexico which provides insight and resources to those considering expat life in Mexico, including the newly-released, "If Only I Had a Place" on renting in Mexico, luxuriously.  Her second book is “The Mexico Solution: Saving your money, sanity, and quality of life through part-time life in Mexico.” Most recently she released “The Lazy Expat: Healthy Recipes That Translate in Mexico” a cookbook for travelers, snowbirds and expats who are seeking a healthy diet in Mexico (You must cook.)