Cleaning Your Keyboard

Have you got cockroaches picnicking in your keyboard? Well, till a while back we did! There were about 5-6 of them who would hide under the keys and party on whatever food crumbs came their way as a result of us snacking while working on the system. For reasons unknown to me, they suddenly left for greener pastures. We think it had something to do with the lizard that now resides in our kitchen after all she has put on a lot of weight recently.


On a more serious note, as our lives become more computer centric, we like to do everything while Washing Keyboard surfing the Internet, chatting with friends, or blog while having coffee. Of course, spills will occur and portions of our food will miss our mouth and land onto the keyboard. The keyboard, is the toughest to clean and therefor most annoying. A couple of weeks ago, I got really sick of the dirty keyboard and had the brain wave to wash it.

So Tina and I ripped apart the keyboard as explained in this article, separated the electronic circuitry and put the rest under a jet of water. Once washed, we let it dry for about 90 minutes, reassembled the circuitry and plugged it into its rightful place. As things turned out, the keyboard continues to function properly so washing the thing wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

You don’t have to take my word for it and wash your keyboard as well. Feel free to try try other approaches. You can get a can of compressed air and blow out the much, use tissues to clean the space between the keys, or try out the tip posted on LifeHacker. The tip suggests using sticking a strip of plain old transparent tape between the keys and then pulling it off in one go, kinda like waxing. But wouldn’t that leave the keys sticky thereby allowing more muck to stick on them, and that to more firmly?

I guess so. So I am going to stick with my washing technique, how about you? Happy cleaning!