HOW DIRTY IS YOUR MOUSE?
Nik Rawlinson pulls on his rubber gloves and explores how you can best give your tech kit a spring clean
You wash your hands after using the toilet, but how often do you wash them after typing? Researchers for CBT Nuggets, who swabbed a range of items in a typical office, found that the typical keyboard is around 20,000 times dirtier than a toilet seat. On the keyboards they tested, scientists found over 3.5 million colony-forming units of bacteria, yeast or mould per square inch, compared to just 172 on a toilet seat.
It’s a similar situation when you compare computer mice to toilet handles (1.37 million colony-forming units per square inch versus just 30). If that sounds surprising, remember that we regularly clean our bathrooms. When did you last clean your computer – or your phone, come to that? The same study found that the average smartphone harbours 1.6 million colony-forming units over every square inch.
Cleaning your kit won’t make your computer run faster or last longer, but it will make your desk a more pleasant place to spend the working day and could, conceivably, reduce the likelihood of you falling sick. So let’s look at the most effective ways of cleaning your IT kit. None of them costs much money or is difficult to perform, but
each should offer some peace of mind.
The keyboard
You probably spend more time touching your keyboard than even your mouse – so it’s a good starting point. To begin, unplug it or, if you’re using a laptop, turn off the power and disconnect the charger. A surprising amount of dirt can become trapped between or beneath the keys, especially if you’re using a keyboard with raised buttons. Start by laying a piece of paper on your desk, turning the keyboard upside-down and shaking out as much as you can. You may be surprised by how much is released, although this will be far from everything. As a next step, you can use a vacuum cleaner with a soft brush to suck any remaining crumbs and grit from between the keys. Or, use a can of compressed air to blow them out; you can buy this from business stationery suppliers for £5 or less, or even cheaper on eBay. Make sure yours is supplied with a straw-like nozzle, like the ones included with WD-40 cans, which you can run between the keys. Keyboard manufacturers generally warn against dismantling your keyboard, and if you’re using a laptop then getting at the keyboard may involve extensive dismantling. However, if you’re still concerned about the amount of dirt beneath your keys, you can dig deeper. If your keyboard is of the mechanical type, with a reasonable gap between the bottom of the key and the base of the keyboard itself, you can invest in a specialised key cap remover (sometimes called a puller). These shouldn’t be used on larger keys such as the spacebar, shift, backspace, enter and zero on the numeric keypad, since these often have more than one fixing point beneath. You can pick up a puller for around £4 on Amazon.
With the internal dirt removed, use an antiseptic wipe to clean the surface of the keys themselves. Ensure that it’s only moist, not dripping wet, so that no liquid comes into contact with anything inside the keyboard.
What if you want to give your keyboard a really deep clean? It’s been suggested that it’s safe to clean your keyboard in a dishwasher, but we wouldn’t take this as gospel. You’ll find plenty of stories online of people successfully doing so – the trick, apparently, is not to use soap, and to skip the drying cycle so your keyboard doesn’t get baked. This isn’t something we’d recommend, however; and keyboard manufacturer Das Keyboard recommends that you avoid the dishwasher method at all costs. “Exposing circuits and other electrical parts to water could render the entire thing useless,” it points out.
That’s not to say that home treatments can’t work. One Das Keyboard customer successfully repaired a keyboard that had suffered a wine spill: “I stripped off all key caps,” he reported, “disconnected the main keyboard from the PCB, and bathed the board in 91% isopropyl alcohol for a few minutes while repeatedly pressing the switches that had become stuck by the wine. After five minutes of dripping, I then used a hairdryer for a further five minutes to completely evaporate the remaining alcohol”.
If you’re a regular tinkerer then you may already have some isopropyl alcohol in a cupboard – it’s commonly used as a cleaning solvent. If not, Maplin sells it by the litre for £14.99, or 400ml for £9.99. Microsoft recommends using isopropyl alcohol on a soft, lint-free cloth to clean the spine or magnetic connections of a Surface cover.
Once you’ve taken the time to clean your keyboard, keep it clean by investing in a gel cover that remains in place while it’s used. You’ll need to find one that suits your model, but Amazon and eBay are both excellent starting points, with prices beginning at £1.20 on the latter.
The mouse
The days when cleaning a mouse meant popping out the ball and scraping gunk off the internal rollers are over, for all but the retro diehards among us. Nowadays, tracking errors are typically caused by hair over the mouse sensor. This is easily solved by either blowing or picking them out with tweezers.
If you need to clean the lens itself, use a cotton bud, optionally dipped in alcohol; this can also be used to clean any grubby feet or runners. To get rid of ingrained dirt on the underside, scrape gently with a soft toothpick.
If your mouse has a touch-sensitive upper surface, grime and grease from your hands may reduce its effectiveness over time. Apple, which popularised such peripherals with the Magic Mouse, recommends cleaning with a lint-free cloth lightly moistened with water, and says, “don’t get moisture in any openings or use aerosol sprays, solvents, abrasives, or cleaners containing hydrogen peroxide”. The same advice holds for other touch-sensitive mice. Alternatively, a soft art eraser (sometimes called a kneaded eraser or putty rubber) used lightly should also remove dirt from the surface.
The mouse itself is only half of the story, though; if you use a mouse mat,
this is unlikely to be much cleaner. How you deal with it depends on its composition: plastic can usually be wiped with an anti-bacterial cloth, but that may be less effective on a rubber-backed fabric mat, and could also risk marking the surface. The simplest solution is to ditch the mat entirely. If you can’t use your mouse directly on the desk, consider a sheet of A4, which you can recycle every few days. Of course, you can also print on the paper beforehand, so if your mouse mat has been personalised with a picture of your children then you can recreate it on paper. Alternatively, switch to an antimicrobial mat, such as the Fellowes Microban Mouse Pad, which you can pick up from stationery suppliers for around £5.
The screen
There’s no point paying for a pin-sharp, high-DPI display if all the detail is lost behind fingerprints and a layer of dirt. That’s especially true for touchscreen devices – but the good news is that modern touchscreens are generally given an oleophobic coating in the factory to repel fingerprints. This means day-to-day cleaning can often be done using the kind of cloth that opticians supply with glasses. Don’t get too enthusiastic when wiping your screen. Microsoft advises that, when cleaning the display of a Surface tablet, “you don’t need to rub hard to remove fingerprints or oily spots. To avoid scratches, use a soft, lint-free cloth to gently wipe the screen. You can dampen the cloth with water or a lens cleaner, but don’t apply liquids directly to it. Don’t use window cleaner or other chemical cleaners.” It’s advice that applies equally to any touch-sensitive display. If you need a more thorough clean, there are plenty of companies offering specialised screen-cleaners. Indeed, there are so many it’s impossible to test them all, but one we’ve had good experiences with is Whoosh! Tech Screen Shine, which you can pick up in Argos for £9.99. The pack contains a cleaning solution and an antimicrobial cloth, which should last for around 250 sprays (you need a couple of squirts per cleaning, depending on the size of your screen). We’ve used it on touchscreen and regular LCD panels without issue. A cheaper alternative, albeit one that may not last as long, are the Fellowes Touchscreen Cleaning Wipes sold at Wilko ( wilko.com) for £1.50 a pack.
The insides
It’s unlikely that there’s a huge colony of bacteria inside your PC, but the internals do collect dust, which clogs up vents and hinders airflow. This can cause temperatures to rise, affecting performance and reliability. This shouldn’t need cleaning out very often, but it isn’t difficult to do if you feel it’s necessary.
Before opening up the case of your PC (assuming this is possible), turn it off and follow the usual safety advice to minimise static discharge or damage to its delicate internal components. It makes sense to unplug external cables, but don’t unplug the internal cables connecting components to the motherboard – these are generally a tight fit, and will naturally keep out dust.
Similarly, don’t remove the CPU heatsink or fan unless you’re in the process of upgrading them, and when replacing them be sure to always use adequate thermal transfer paste. Failing to reseat them properly can have disastrous consequences.
When it comes to removing the dust, we don’t recommend using your domestic vacuum cleaner. The nozzle will almost certainly be too big and clumsy to get into the crannies of a motherboard, and there’s a risk of accidentally bashing internal components. A miniature, battery-operated vacuum cleaner is a much better option: you can get one from Maplin, which comes with a selection of attachments, for just £4.99.
If you’d rather blow out the dust than suck, it’s best to avoid compressed gas, at least at close quarters; its native pressure could be enough to unseat smaller components and, when used for extended periods, the gas can condense and cause droplets to form. A mains-powered alternative, such as the CompuCleaner Electric Air Duster (£40 from Amazon) can do the same job without the risk of condensation.
The rest
Most other office equipment, including printers, cabinets and so on, can be cleaned using either antiseptic wipes or dedicated office cleaning products. Own-brand and no-brand products abound, and they’re not particularly expensive. For example, it’s easy to pick up a tub of 100 multipurpose cleaning wipes for keyboards, mice, phones and other office accessories from Amazon for £6.99, including delivery.
As with many maintenance jobs, keeping your tech kit clean doesn’t take long, but it’s best done on an ongoing basis, rather than leaving it until you notice how dirty things have become.
If you’re looking after tech for a large team, consider supplementing ongoing personal cleaning with periodic contracted spring cleans. Search Google for “office equipment cleaning UK” or similar, and you’ll find there are plenty of dedicated services set up to satisfy precisely
these requirements.