maandag 13 augustus 2007

Cleaning a Keyboard

My keyboard is about 5 years old, and it has been used extensively. During these years, it has become more and more filthy.
Now, I thought the time has come to do something about it. Basically, I had two options:

  • Buy a new keyboard
  • Clean my keyboard

I thought the second option was more of a challenge then just buying a new one.
So, this is what I did.

To give you an idea of how filthy my keyboard actually was, I've made a picture of it:

filthy keyboard

After I took a picture of the layout of my keyboard, I removed all keys from the board. You can imagine that the picture I've taken comes in quite handy when I wanted to place the keys back.

removing keys from keyboard

I've put all the keys in a bucket of water, and cleaned them.
After removing all the keys, the keyboard looked like this:

stripped keyboard

Hmm, this contains a lot of filth as well. I made good use of the vacuum-cleaner to remove most of it.
Then, when all the cleaned keys were dry again, I could put all the keys back to where they belong. The result: a clean keyboard:

clean keyboard

It was quite some work, but, devving with a clean keyboard is much nicer then using a dirty one. ;)

5 opmerkingen:

Anoniem zei

I just stick mine in the dishwasher and let it dry for 2 or 3 days. :)

Anoniem zei

what about a can of compressed air? does the trick every time for me.

Frederik Gheysels zei

Compressed air would certainly be helpfull to remove the dust and dirt between the keys (and underneath the keys once the keys are removed).
However, to really clean the keys themselves, compressed air just wouldn't be enough

Anoniem zei

A very nice job you've done here!

I think I can't remove the keys from my keyboard. I have a very flat keyboard from Logitech, looks like a laptop keyboard.

Anoniem zei

@Serge:

You can lift them from the lower part of the button. They are probably siccor keys. But watch out, they are fragile.

@Unexpected: the filt is sticky, kinda greasy, you can't remove that by air.

My G15 looks the same, I should remove the keys, but it takes a while.