Personally, I used fap all the time. If it takes you 3 attacks to kill a thread, and you can do it in 2 with fap, that means you take out 2 threads in 5 turns instead of 6. If you find yourself always missing pwning a thread by a few damage, fap will make things go faster. It seemed to tack on about 10-20 damage to attacks, which can make the difference between pwning and not pwning a thread. Over 3 turns, that makes it an additional 30-60 damage, which is a pretty nice attack on it’s own. Personally, I went through the game always using fap, and it seemed to make things easier than not using it.

And of course, don’t waste your money on the better computers. I did, and it pushed back how soon I could beat the game by a day or two due to lack of flezz. Even then, the cost of repairing them is higher than you would pay for healing items in most cases.

As for the ego boosts- it depends. The higher your max ego, the easier it is to grind without having to waste flezz on healing items. Right now I have 280 ego, and I can pwn pretty much all the forums aside from the final one without using healing items.