Whilst laptops are a great portable computing solution, by their very nature they are much more vulnerable to wear and tear than their “static” desktop counterparts. So, although one of the obvious advantages of a laptop is that you can chill on the sofa with a cup of coffee whilst downloading music or managing those accounts, there is a clear drawback – spillages.
Whilst much of the following advice is true for desktops as well as keyboards, keyboards for laptops and keyboards for desktops have one significant difference. Before you clean your desktop keyboard, you are easily able to detach it from the rest of the system. With keyboards for laptops on the other hand, you’re going to have adapt the cleaning method to fit around the rest of the laptop hardware.
With this in mind, before cleaning your keyboard, you need to ensure that there is no power running through the computer, and this is can be done most effectively by removing the battery.
If you want to just give your laptop keyboard a superficial clean to keep it in good condition, you can clean it with the keys intact. How you do it can vary, and you could simply clean the keys with a lint free cloth, or you could use a can of compressed air to give a more thorough clean.
If you want to give you keyboards a proper going over, however, you can remove the keys. Although this sounds potentially time consuming and harmful for your laptop, they can be pried of pretty simply using a knife (take care not to damage the laptop hardware). Having done this you can then clean the keys in a bowl of soapy water.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 12:17 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed.