A Clean Computer is a Happy Computer

Hopefully, you have a list of personal items that you regularly clean. Obvious belongings that need a good scrubbing are things like bed sheets, dishes, and your bathroom floor. If your computer is not on your cleaning chore list, then it needs to be. A clean computer is a happy computer, and not disgusting like a dirty one.

Take a moment and think about how much you use your PC and how much touching is involved. Even if you only use your computer a couple of hours each day, without regular cleaning, there is enough germs accumulated on your keyboard to make Howard Hughes want crawl back inside his tissue box.

Would you use a toilet seat to type a report? Well, it is estimated that if you eat at your desk, then there are three times more germs on your mouse and keyboard than on a toilet seat. Germs are gross enough, but the food factor makes it worse because harmful bugs that are microscopic in size will breed in the food crumbs. It is best not think about how many bugs you are squashing with every keystroke.

Don't believe us? Flip over your keyboard and give it a good shake. Those orange chunks that fall out on your desk are from the bag of Doritos that you ate three months ago. You will see other chunks in the pile, and as you will see, not everything that falls out of your keyboard will be food related. You can even turn this cleaning exercise into a fun office game to see whose keyboard can produce the biggest pile of crud.

To clean up your keyboard properly, we recommend that you use a can of compressed air and disinfectant wipes, regularly. While your cleaning supplies are still out, go ahead and pop open the case to your PC and hit all the spots that have accumulated dust with a paper towel and a shot of air. Just be careful not to hit the fans directly with the compressed air or you might cause them to overspin.

If this is your first time that you are performing this dusting maneuver, then you might be surprised to see how dirty the inards of your computer are. Your computer case may also be worse off than your toilet, seeing as it is full of dust bunnies that are made of hair, lint, dead skin, spider webs, dust, and sometimes light rubbish and debris. Computer dust bunnies are held together by static electricity in a felt-like entanglement and also contain dust mites and other parasites.

Periodic cleaning of the insides of your computer is recommend, not only because of the yuck factor, but also to improve PC performance. Dust can clog fans causing computers to overheat. Taking time to remove the dust will help your PC to last longer. Lastly, be sure to give your monitors a good wipe down. We recommend that you use a microfiber cloth dampened with a fifty-fifty mix of water and vinegar.

Preferred will assist you with many of your IT services, but we are not a maid service. You are on your own for this computer cleaning adventure. Although, we do make it an effort to clean out every computer that we service as best we can with the cleaning methods we discussed. What do you think? Are you ready to burn your keyboard and mouse? Did you find anything interesting hiding underneath your keypad? Let us know in the comments!