I’ve put a lot of miles on my keyboard. My current one is the standard USB Powermac keyboard that came with my main system, a 1GHz G4 that I bought in March of 2003. Over the past two years, it’s become full of dirt, hair, drink spillage and cheezy poof crumbs. It got pretty gross.
So, last week, I put my keyboard in the dishwasher. When the cycle was done, I took it outside, shook it, and dropped it into the drying rack next to the sink. A couple of days later, when it appeared dry, I plugged it back into my Mac. It didn’t work. Worried, I left it to dry for another three days. Yesterday, I plugged it back in again. Bingo.
Now I have a clean, working keyboard that looks almost as nice as it did when I first got it.
Try that with a laptop keyboard.
Personally, the compressed air stuff tends to work just fine for me, but I don’t do any of that “industrial” scale computing.
Yes, here in the…er…snack-food industry, the keyboards tend to get rather filthy.
I’ve heard some of the oddest stories involving electronics, and this has to rank up there, along with the Gameboy that worked after months of rain, snow, and sun outside, and the digital camera that shot nothing but surreal pictures after being rescued from a pond. But with my luck in electronics (I push them too hard, already on my second Mac in three years), I think I’ll leave that method to you.
It turns out that keyboards (wired, not wireless) lack anything hydrophobic. In motherboard manufacturing, in fact, they’re often hosed down after the final manufacturing step. (I recall doing this with circuit boards at a job I once had, after I finished soldering ’em.) What really surprised me is that soap is OK. I figured that’d be off-limits, but after reading around, it seems that just using a dab isn’t a problem at all.
I’m with you, CR, on the toughness of electronics. I figure if I can’t toss a laptop in my backpack and have it survive, it’s not good enough. Amazingly, my iBook has held up for 2.5 years so far. My Powerbooks before that, too, kept ticking after years of abuse.