Friday, April 3, 2015

Cleaning my Keyboard

My keyboard got really messy, as I have the bad habit of watching movies on my PC and thinking: "Some chips would go well with this movie!" without concidering the effect it has on my keyboard and mouse. Also, it has been sitting here for a couple of years so loads of dust managed to get under the different keys. The only solution was to completely clean it, and the process took me about an hour or so.
To begin with, I took a picture of what my keyboard looked like in the beginning so that I wouldn't place any of the keys in the wrong order. I forget things like that very easily, so it wouldn't even surprise me anymore.

As you can see, I had already taken the space bar out when I thought of this hint I got from watching LinusTechTips' videos (very handy for picking up any techy ideas and watching reviews on what he thinks is "worthy" of his channel). He used this idea when he was repairing a soaked laptop so that he would remember where all of the parts he had taken out originally were.
Next, I started to pull all of the keys out and blow the dust off of them. This is what took me the majority of the time I spent cleaning the keyboard, and it was a very boring and repetitive process. I could've just put some music on, but I'm not that smart ;-)

As you can see, I didn't put the top row of buttons off because they just felt very different from the others and I didn't know if I would be able to put them back afterwards. Also, there wasn't any dust under there anyways.
After doing that, I used an air compressor to really blow away all of the dust (pun intended :P ). As not all of the dust was gone yet, I used a piece of cloth to get the dust out of nearly every corner.
Then it was time to put my keyboard back together. This went a lot faster than taking the keys out, as just pushing it in the right hole (No, that is NOT what she said!) obviously went a lot faster than getting my fingers under the corners of the key properly and trying to get that thing to let go of its keys (Am I a thief now?).
Now I can type with a keyboard without getting dust onto my fingers every 5 minutes, it consumed some of my valuable time (I needed it for preparing to go on a holiday to Switzerland) but it sure was worth it.
I hope you liked this post and have learned from my mistakes. Here's a quick checklist of what you should keep in mind when doing a full cleanup of your keyboard:
  1. HAVE TIME! It'll take you a longer time than you would expect, trust me. I thought it'd be done in like 15 minutes but it turned out to be over four times that. If you rush through the process, you'll have to spend more time on it in the long run. Apparently it's not only women that are time consuming :-)
  2. TAKE PICS! That camera on your smartphone is there for a reason, take pictures of any information you might need later. If your friends are mad at you for not having time to come on Facebook or Skype, simply show them the pictures. That, my friend, is how men multi-task ;-)
  3. Apart from that, basically just make sure you don't spill anything into the insides of your keyboard and don't try anything crazy. You should be just fine.


1 comment:

  1. Great tips! In addition to cleaning your keyboard regularly, you should also consider washing your hands from time to time.



    -Hannah J.
    CCleaner

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