What Is the Best Way To Disinfect Your Laptop?

akutz writes "I've had the flu since Tuesday afternoon. My wife picked me up from work with a temperature of 103.6 and it finally broke at 98.7 around 3am this morning. Yay. The problem is that I used my laptop during my periods of feverish deliriousness, contaminating my shiny 15" MacBook Pro with the icky influenza virus. I am asking my fellow Slashdotters if they have ever sought out a good way of disinfecting their lucky laptops after an illness. Do you use soap? A light acid bath? Just get the family dog to lick it until it looks clean?"

Cleaning keyboards/laptops

[thewiz]

I've cleaned many keyboards by placing them in the dishwasher and running them through a couple of cycles.
Kills anything on them; try it but remember to let it dry out for a couple of days before using it.

A High Geek-factor Sanitizer...

[NewbieV]

...would be a UV-C Light Wand from this company [germguardian.com].

Acetone

[bluefoxlucid]

Spray atomized acetone on the thing, with the power off and battery out, no mains power, 15 minutes for caps to discharge (should be much faster). Avoid the screen (I'm not sure if the screen has a mylar coating, and the effect of acetone on that).

Acetone evaporates in a few seconds.

No, it's a serious problem

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this is relevant. The article deals with a serious problem: a mania for disinfection in the USA.

After years of expensive advertising by many companies, for many products, in many media, after many years, finally S. C. Johnson & Co. have convinced a substantial number of people that the terrorists, oops, sorry, I mean germs are a huge threat -- HUGE! -- and they are just about to overwhelm us; that we desperately need the help of sophisticated surveillance, oops, sorry, I mean, chemicals to stave off our all-but-certain doom. It's our last hope, our only hope.

Lies, lies, lies.

Disinfectant Wipes

[pease1]

Gads you all over engineer this. Pick up some disinfectant "wipes" at a grocery store. They work great on keyboards and mice (door handles, steering wheels, TV remotes, gameboys, etc, as well). Cleans up dirt at the same time. When you grow up and have young kids, you'll want to wipe down the keyboard/mice of the family box all the time anyway, specially during flu season.

Re:UV light

[linzeal]

Yeah it is night and day for my girlfriend and my laptops. I love sunlight and often go out and use my laptop outside and she has taken to using her laptop mostly as a 1000 dollar radio inside her dark writers loft. Her laptop is simply something I will not touch as it has been on top of a messy food strewn desk or kept at her side while we eat at the kitchen table more often than ever been taken to school or work or play in the wide expanse of the outside world. The last time I cleaned out her laptop in march I wore latex gloves and taking it completely apart discovered that there were graham cracker crumbs inside the fan housing for the CPU and 1000's of particles of food and detritus; some of which had mold appearing to grow on it, ewww. My solution was compressed air than wiping it down with Lysol as others have suggested but it is pretty disgusting again after only 4 months. If you want to stop worrying about germs I would suggest washing your hands more with good old soap and water as well as to STOP EATING at the damn keyboard. God, I hope the GF doesn't read this.

UV Light Alone is Not Enough!

[mencomenco]

1) if you coughed or sprayed on the laptop chance are you've spread mucus under the keys. A UV (or any other) light shone on top of the keys will do nothing to bugs under the caps.

2) See previous /. posts about cleaning keyboards in a dishwasher. It works. Your MAC manual has directions for removing your keyboard easily or check the many MAC repair websites with video on how to remove your KB.. Let dry 2 hours in washer, then overnight in dry air (under 15% relative humidity). If it's rainy use a hairdryer on LOW, stay 8" from the plastic (duh!), wait 15 min and repeat. Repeat again, and wait overnight to re-install. Your KB should now be dry and clean as new. One caveat -- never pull directly on any thin wires or you WILL be sorry, sorry, sorry. Use tweezers

3) Second the alcohol wipes. Use the 90% ethyl if you can find it, 70% ethyl second choice, then follow up with 90% isopropyl. IMHO 70% isopropyl is useless.

4) Still worried? Call around to local hospitals and veterinarians (houskeeping and surgical dept are the place to start) and find one that practices "Cold" or "Gas" sterilization. you doctor may also do this in his/her office or know someone who knows someone...

5) Do you use a cellphone too?

Re:Set it out in the Sun

[Squalish]

Speaking very, very generally, the broader spectrum and the higher dose the poison (whatever the poison - animal, vegetable, or mineral), the more difficult it is for a population to evolve resistance against it. Bleach kills almost everything - it's a broad-spectrum disinfectant precisely because organisms have found such difficulty in evolving defenses against a bleachy environment. A very narrow-spectrum poison, perhaps a bioengineered virus which targets a single strand of DNA present in 20% of the population for its high lethality, quickly finds itself going up against organisms which are resistant to its spread. In a generation or two, most of those organisms are dead or have developed antibodies against it, or, in many creatures, have inherited antibodies against it from their mothers. The population routes around the problem, because avoiding that strand of DNA is necessary for survival. Against a wider spectrum poison like high temperatures, a hugely unlikely, very complicated system of heat disposal might be required for any of the population to survive. UV tolerance is relatively easy in human beings (it's been estimated that a thousand years in a different environment is enough to change a population's skin color entirely, from opposing evolutionary pressures involving essential nutrients dark skin can't make, and essential nutrients sunburnt, dead skin can't make), but only because we as large multicellular animals have evolved multiple redundant structures to deal with it - fur/hair, thick layers of dead skin on back and shoulders, variable melanin production adjustable by multiple genes, external means like clothes, houses, hats, and forest canopies, and even short-term adaptations like temporary melanin production during tanning.

Re:UV light

[phantomlord]

Not all viruses die in a dry environment. When my dad was in the hospital for 5 months back in 1998, he was colonized by VRE [wikipedia.org]. When Infectious Disease came to talk to us about it, they said that it will stay alive on virtually any surface for an indefinite amount of time. I've also heard that MRSA acts the same way. The only way to kill it is by sterilization.

Re:Lysol

[arivanov]

For influenza (or most viruses for that matter) you do not need even that. They live for half an hour/hour tops outside the human body. Usually even less.

Now bacteria is a completely different ball game. Some of them (the ones that can produce spores) can survive even boiling the laptop and dipping it into bleach.

So frankly, the best thing to do is to do nothing at all.

You don't need to

[Anonymous Coward]

You see, human beings have a thing called an 'immune system'. Once this 'immune system' has encountered and defeated an infection, that infection will be unable to return, because the 'immune system' will recognise it and know exactly how to get rid of it. Using chemicals or disinfectants all the time is only going to result in getting you sick because it kills off the weak germs that are no threat to you, leaving the more powerful ones with no competition. Also, they don't work on viri. Nothing works on viri. Only your own 'immune system'.
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