Public Service Announcement: Clean your keyboards!!11

[LeekClock]

Above: A pile of keys. Below: The board with keys removed.


 

 Just don’t do it the way I did.


 Mine was becoming a bit grubby and dusty so I thought i’d better wipe it clean. Then it occurred to me that if it were so grubby on the outside then it must be awful on the inside!


 So I removed all the keys (they pop out with ease), soaked them in warm soapy water for a while and left them to dry.

 
 Underneath the keys, the board was stomach-turningly filthy. Almost a year ago now I was living in my family home with my cat, Suzie - little did I know, half of Suzie had traveled with me to Belgium and to Germany, hidden in my keyboard. There was enough cat hair matted under the keys to make a fireside rug!


 I carefully removed all that deposition and cleaned it with a moist cloth, and some cotton buds. I put the whole thing back together like some nerdy puzzle. I plugged it in and to my surprise it worked perfectly right away.


 A few hours later, functionality began to disappear, key by key. I used the onscreen keyboard (ugh) for a while, but by the next day so few keys worked that I couldn’t type my username and password and thus was locked out of my own computer.


 I thought the lack of functionality might be down to water (even though my cloth was only a little damp) entering the circuitry somewhere and crossing circuits that weren’t meant to be crossed. So I waited a few days for it to dry, but to no avail.

 
 

Now I’m using a cheap German mini keyboard. The keys are adorably different and often don’t correspond to the characters that appear on screen when I press them, but if I don’t look down at the keys i’m pressing, it’s all the same. Plus now I have more space on my desk. Happy ending.

[ChocolateCoffin]

*actual size

[Nightmare Clock]

I would, but this is my only keyboard, and I fear what might dwell beneath these keys.

[teh Hamburgler]

Dude I am looking at my keys right now and they are that filthy

[RomanClock]

ITS A QWERTZ KEYBOARD RUN FOR IT

[WiiClock]

fucking qwertz

[beebles]

I still use the keyboard that came with my 386 in 1992 or so. I dont know if I want to clean out 16 odd years of filth.

[Wind-up Clock]

just turn it upside down and shake it. That gets rid of crumbs and stuff.

I did that to this keyboard, and six months worth of pencil shavings and foodstuff crumbs came tumbling out.

[teh Hamburgler]

How do you getz the stickyz off your keyboard?

[LeekClock]

Put your keyboard in a dishwasher

[LambdaClock]

put your head in a dishwasher too

nice pics leek, it makes everything look much nicer btw.

My keys are clean as a whistle.

[BilliardBall10]

i have cleaned it v. recently

[LeekClock]

I swear it was the cat, cadillacclock. She used to come and sit on my hands as I was typing so as to force me to pay attention to her.

[Porti Fatti]

I don't wanna break my wireless keyboard but thats something to think about. I just wonder how disgusting it is on keyboards at internet cafes or schools.

[LambdaClock]

see through keys r the way 2 go

[joliet_jane]

I happened to have a can of compressed air nearby, so I just now used it on my keyboard.

I could smell the filth cloud.

[beebles]

I swear it was the cat, cadillacclock. She used to come and sit on my hands as I was

very common cat behaviour apparently. Cat jumping on laptop as i type

[HeinekenClock]

I'm afraid to clean it because it's a laptop keyboard, and if I break it, I have to send the laptop away for years while some monkeys try to figure out how to replace a keyboard in a laptop, all the while I'm wasting away, making actual friends and forgetting all about my hopes and dreams on the internet.