All you compusive screen-jabbers who call the rest of us anal or insensitive:
You are simply inconsiderate for smudging up the screen I have to look at all day and making me go to the effort of cleaning your grease off.
Worse, you are insulting, for thinking we somehow couldn’t follow a simple pointing gesture a few more inches to the screen without your fingertip actually contacting the pixels in question.
When you point out a person at a meeting or party, do you run right up and poke them? “This is my friend Bob! (POKE) This guy right here! (POKE POKE.)”
We make software that replaces hardware equipment control panels with PC-based ones. Almost Every customer asks “Can your software be used with a touchscreen”, but not one of them (to my knowledge)has ever installed a touchscreen-operated system.
Ok. I clean my keyboard and I clean my desk. But only with normal detergent (no with powerful antibacterial soap). And the good reason is that if you do this you are just creating strain of resistant bacteria and you are weakening you immune system. Children living in “too clean” homes are very prone to asthma. So clean you stuff but not too much. Stay rational…
Please read this before beginning your war against bacterias: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no2/larson.htm - "From the public health perspective, more frequent use of current hygiene practices may not necessarily be better (i.e., perhaps sometimes clean is “too clean”), and the same recommendations cannot be applied to all users or situations." http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/1031002421.html http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f01/web3/bond.html
(eat french cheese. They’ll prepare your body for just anything…)
Getting a bit obsessive-compulsive there are you not? Who ever died from a keyboard acquired infection?
Your immune system is incredibly sophisticated and provided you look after yourself (eat well, do some exercise) it should have no problem fighting of such bacteria.
I could care less about germs, but I spend/waste so much time cleaning mice and keyboards in computer labs. It’s almost like popping bubble wrap, scraping all the gunk off of the ‘’ key (the dirtiest key, in my experience). I usually don’t do a single productive thing until \456789, spacebar, Delete, Home, Page Up, Page Down, End, the num pad, and the part of the keyboard above the arrow keys have had their gunk scratched off.
Oh, and I touch monitors religiously. I touched mine no less than 4 times will reading this article and the comments.
Jeff, do you use an Ergonomic 4000 keyboard? I dismantled my previous Ergonomic Keyboard (a Natural Pro) very easily, shoved it in the dishwasher and it came out as good as new.
Recently I tried dismantling one of my Ergo 4000s (spilt green tea on it and the left shift, enter and #3 key stopped working) and after removing the 20 or so screws round the back, couldn’t get the keys off etc. It’s a nightmare to take a part and I can’t find a tutorial on the web either.
It’s nice being able to shove it in the dishwasher to get that as good as new look. Don’t think I’ll be able to do it with the Ergo 4000 though (I really don’t want to soak the circuit board).
A trick I used to speed up drying is to put the device (soaked cell phones, keyboards, etc) in the air-conditioner closet (obviously for those that have the integrated system). I keep a fishnet baggy in the closet for drying things out quickly. It dries things out in a few hours because of the massive volume of air moving through a small cross section.
Just a quick note on cleaning screens. I was unfortunate enough to be a tech support agent for the sony vaio range of laptops over here in Ireland and you’d be amazed at the amount of void warrentys because people wash screens with small amounts of screen wash(specific for lcd screens by the way). Some brands destroy the LCD screens. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!
Yes, this is a pet peeve as well. Especially when I have paid for the monitor.
3 problems:
Fingerprints make chunks of text unreadable.
Finger pressure on LCD screens kills pixels.
Fingernails and pens scratch LCD panels leading to problem 1.
At home, my EIZO has had the good fortune to never have been cleaned except with a non-contact puffer to remove dust. The monitor I had before that was killed by a warranty repair: it went away mint and came back smeared and scratched with dead pixels from being vigorously rubbed with what must have been a muddy rag. After nearly 12 months of argument (during which time I bought my EIZO), they replaced it with a model worth 1/3 the original value (thanks, Mitsubishi Australia), after initially trying to replace it with the bottom model (it was the top model that they had wrecked).
The other one which really annoys me is people who feel obliged to resize and reposition my conveniently layed out windows to their liking (usually everything smaller and placed in the dead centre of the screen, one on top of the other, because for some reason they can’t read a window in any other size or position or tolerate having more than one window visible at once) and roaming technicians who feel obliged to do this AND adjust my chair and monitor height to suit them so they can spend 2 minutes at my desk applying a patch.
“It was amazing how many tech-savvy people were poking there screen trying to open a document.”
We had someone employed as an “IT security expert” warning people about the dangers of ID theft on TV last night. Despite his “professional credentials” he admitted to recently having had his eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Internet Banking, and PayPal all hijacked at once through giving them all the same username and password and entering his credentials into a number of phishing emails.
“Compressed air dusters are great for cleaning, but terrible for the environment.”
Mine’s a photographer’s blower brush bulb with the brush removed: 100% manual, no pollutants, no refills and costs about $2-3. Lasts as long as your fingers are movable and the decades it takes the rubber to perish (mine is 25 years old and still going strong).
I use pretty much public computers quite a bit, and all the monitors have finger prints and stuff on them. I don’t really care if people touch them, it’s nothing to do with me. At home though there’s no one near my computer except me, so no reason to touch it. Not sure how I would feel about it though, depends if they eave much of a mark.
As for putting electronics in the dishwasher… I’d do it if I had a cheap keyboard I don’t need. However, I don’t want to put my Microsoft 4000 through. Especially considering that I accidently put my iPod Nano through the wash a few months ago and now the backlight doesn’t work. I need to clean my monitor, it seems to collect a bit of dust.
I keep a dry paint 1-1/2" paint brush next to my monitor and use it for dusting the keyboard just about everyday. It does a pretty good job of getting into the tiny plastic grooves and what not. As for really cleaning, I keep a container of Lysol Disinfecting Wipes and use those on keyboard, mouse (mouse wheels can get nasty), desk, phone, etc. After reading this post I’ll probably be more OCD now, thanks Jeff! (Did I mention I never touch door knobs, either?)
As a Unix and C programmer, I am required to have a beard. This means that I inevitably have a few bits of trimmed hairs and, yes, some dandruff like schmutz, that fall down whenever I scratch my chin while reading or thinking about something. This used to all fall into my keyboard, until I got a zany and expensize completely split keyboard (from Kinesis – I recommend it if you have discomfort on any normal or typical ergo keyboards or just like having many different positions for your hands).
And yeah, I eat lunch at my desk while reading the web. THose crumbs used to inevitably end up in my keyboard.
Now with the split keyboard it just lands in the space between on my desk.
I also have the luxury of a machine shop at my place of employment with an air compressor, really gets keyboards clean.
Also, there is an advantage to the boring beige or grey classic PC colors – dirt and oil and schmutz doesn’t show as well there. (Just darker grime buildup.)
