Hooray for huge useless images in blog posts! I thought we’d lost you…
Well, thanks a lot. On your advice Jeff I put my Vostro in the dishwasher and I think it must have shorted the battery or something. Posted from my Blackberry, of course.
I heard ATM touch screens are worse than a keyboard. Think of that next time your getting some cash.
I regulary use a dash of vodka to clean the screen and keyboard on my MacBook - works nicely and its much cheaper than specialist cleaning products like ScreenClean.
No matter how much I avoid it, eventually the display gets touched or sneezed on and I gotta wash it, with the same micro fibers cloth - half dry and half damp with WATER - NO DETERGENTS OF ANY KIND EVER The wrong cleaning agent can cause significant damage to LCD and plamas screens and water is almost free and works just fine if you have good clean micro fiber cloth.
As for keyboards - you can’t toss them whole into the dishwasher. Most have thin sheets of plastic covered in conductive ink pressed together with only another insulating sheet of plastic between them. Dry out can take weeks (if ever) and in the mean time, significant corrosion can take place. Avoid that.
Unplug the keyboard, wipe it down on a regular basis, turn it over, knock out the hair, dead skin etc that builds up within (vacume cleaner if you got one) - but eventually, you will need to disassemble and hand wash the keys. About every 9 to 12 months is my cycle for that part.
And for gods sake people, CLEAN YOUR MICE!!! Even worse than those little mobile hovers that people push around their desks called ball mice are the track balls - nothing worse than having to fix something on someone’s machine and the track ball is seized solid with gunk. What the heck is wrong with you people? CLEAN THEM OUT!!! I don’t wanna touch your built up mouse gunk.
I don’t even want to figure out why some people get simple grey dead skin and others end up with slimmy yellow build up instead. And as for the guy who had sticky greenish gung in his mouse - see a doctor, that just ain’t right…
Even if you get the screen so dirty the image colors get bleached out through the film of oil and dirty, screen touching has nothing on poor mouse hygene…
Makes me want to carry a vat of acid around with me. (great, now I am gonna have nightmares about some of the machines I have had to work with)
And ya, the MS natural keyboards are !!great!! to type on, but there appears to be some sort of inverse relationship going on between typing experience and clean-ability.
The MS 4000s are almost impossible to disassemble and reassemble.
Following the trend, the next MS natural keyboard will need a chainsaw and dynamite to open and a phd in advanced physics to reassemble.
Compressed air dusters are great for cleaning, but terrible for the environment. Here’s a quick link with some alternatives. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/05/compressed_air.php
Oh lord - no detergents ever go near any of my LCDs.
I laughed out loud when I read this! “As you can see here (putting down stickybun to touch Atwoods screen), we have a nice circle of sticky bun for loops” Classic - Jeff!
LOL - put down your sticky bun… heh
The closer people’s finger get to my screen, the closer they get to having them broken off. After 1 warning, anything goes.
for my keyboard - vacuuming once in a few months, and wiping the keys with a soft cloth damp with some soap or detergent.
for my display - a dry and clean microfiber cloth…
thats all
This devices are to be used, not worshipped.
Haha!
I hate screen-pokers too. But no-one touches my screen because I work from home…so WHY THE HELL does my screen still look like a camel has french-kissed it? Its covered in marks and I don’t have a clue where they come from.
good blog keep it live !
About the dirty keyboards. It’s quite simple. Just replace it whenever it gets too dirty. Cleaning keyboards is a lost cause anyway, because you’re not likely to get rid of all the food etc. that’s stuck in between the keys unless you pick the thing apart. I guess another solution would be to stop eating at your computer…
I decided to take your suggestion and clean my keyboard with the dishwasher. I’ll be billing you for a new MacBook Pro, thank you very much.
I’m not going to go back and count, but it looks like the obsessive anal clean engineer personality is outnumbering the absent minded scruffy grungy engineer personality in these comments, though there is a healthy middle ground I think (hopefully).
I decided to clean my keyboard in the dishwasher last night. So far, so good. I disassembled it only because it’s just a basic keyboard (not fully of volumne controls, scroll wheels, etc). It did a really good job cleaning it. Just hope it continues to work after I put it back together.
Christian sid: “This devices are to be used, not worshipped.”.
You obviously haven’t used a Model M keyboard. 