Clean your hardware

Eventually, your computer will get covered with dust, dirt, cigarette smoke, pollen, spilled drink, spilled food, dead insects, dandruff, and other unmentionable body parts.

Once a month, clean the computer, to increase the happiness of the computer and the people who see it (you, colleagues, customers, and visitors). To make cleaning easier, many companies prohibit employees from smoking, drinking, or eating near the computer.

Easy cleaning

Before cleaning the computer, turn its power off.

Just take a paper towel, dampen it with plain water, and wipe grime off the keyboard, the monitor’s screen, the monitor’s case, and the system unit’s case.

Do not dribble water into the electronics. That would cause a short circuit and corrosion. Put water just onto the paper towel, not directly onto the hardware.

Do not open the monitor, since it contains high voltages even when “off”.

Don’t use the computer until the water has dried.

Inside the system unit

If you wish to open the system unit’s case, to remove dust from inside it, be careful not to give your computer a shock of static electricity. The computer’s chips are delicate and can get destroyed by even the smallest spark. To avoid shocks, do this:

Avoid working on the computer in the winter, when the air is cold and the humidity is low. Wait until summer, when the air is warm and the humidity is high.

Avoid shuffling across the carpet in rubber-soled shoes. Remove your shoes and socks (so you look like a beach bum or hippie). Remove the carpet, or cover it with a plastic mat (or newspaper), or put anti-static spray on the carpet.

While working on the computer, keep it turned off but still plugged into a 3-prong grounded socket. Keep touching the outside of the computer’s case, which will be grounded. You can also keep touching other big metal objects in the room — so you’ll shock them instead of your computer.

Avoid directly touching the chips.

When fiddling inside the computer’s case, make sure you don’t loosen any of the cables inside, since if a cable gets loose you might forget which socket it belongs in and which direction it should be twisted in.

To remove dust, wipe it off — or just take a deep breath and blow, but try to avoid blowing spit.

Professional cleaning

That’s how to clean your computer for free. Professional repair shops usually spend extra money:

Instead of using water, they use isopropyl alcohol, which dries faster.

Instead of using a paper towel, they use a soft lint-free cloth.

Instead of blowing from their mouths, they blow from a can of compressed air, bought at Radio Shack.

Instead of touching objects to dissipate static electricity, they wear an electrostatic-discharge wrist strap (ESD wrist strap), which is a wrist strap that comes with a wire you can run from your wrist to a grounded metal object (such as the outside of a grounded computer case).

When cleaning a monitor’s screen, do not use alcohol or traditional “glass cleaners”, since they can harm the screen’s anti-glare coating.

Clean your mouse

Here’s how to clean the mouse’s bottom and innards:

Turn the mouse upside down. Using your fingernail, scrape off any gunk you see. (Gunk tends to accumulate on the mouse’s rubber strips or rubber feet.)

In the mouse’s belly, you typically see a rubber ball, whose purpose is to roll on your desktop (or on your mouse pad). Remove the ball’s circular cover (by turning the cover counterclockwise or sliding it toward you). Remove the ball.

On the ball, you’ll probably see a little dust, dirt, hair, or food. Clean the ball by rubbing it against your clothes. (Oooooh! That felt Gooood!) If you prefer, you can clean the ball by using water, but do not use alcohol, which can shrink the ball and make it lopsided.

Look inside the mouse, in the hole where the ball was. On the sides of that hole, you’ll see two rollers (looking like rolling pins) that the ball is supposed to rub against. One of those rollers is for motion in the X direction (horizontal); the other roller is for motion in the Y direction (vertical). Dust and dirt are probably caked onto the middle of each roller. Scrape the dust and dirt off, by using your fingernail.

Then put the ball back into the mouse and put its cover back on (by turning the cover clockwise or sliding it away from you).