It’s that time of year for our (somewhat) annual “Digital Spring-Cleaning” public service announcement. As always, you can revisit all the installments in the series for easy-to-follow tips to tidy up your digital life. Our last post drilled down on dealing with bloated browsers. If you have never felt the Zen-like bliss of an empty inbox or a blank desktop, now is a great time to purge unwanted digital residue for a fresh start to the season.
In this rendition, we are stepping outside our normal approach to the topic for something a little different, ACTUAL cleaning. If you don’t think you need to do this, take that computer keyboard you are sitting in front of right now, turn it upside down and give it a couple of shakes. After you finish pushing all the crumbs into a little pile on your desk, look at some of the links below for best practices on how to clean a few common devices.
- How to Clean Your Keyboard
- Personally, I have always found Q-Tips the best instrument for any cleaning that can’t be taken care of with compressed air.
- How to Clean a Computer Monitor
- Note many sites (like this one) will reference using isopropyl alcohol, but that is only for glass-coated screens like an iMac. This is NOT recommended for most monitors.
- How to Clean Gunk Off of an Optical Computer Mouse
- Wiki-how has a lot of great entries on this subject. You can search there for tips on cleaning most of your digital devices.