I am travelling around a lot, and my laptop is picking up plenty of dust. Lately it is making quite a bit of noise and getting hot. I assume the air vents must be blocked. I always make sure that it isn't sitting directly on a surface but has enough room to circulate air underneath it. I went to a computer place and they wanted to charge me $25 just for cleaning out the vents with a special machine. Surely, they must be a cheaper way. How do you take care of your laptop?
I think $25 to clean the laptop properly is a rather decent price and I'm afraid I don't know how to clean the fans myself. I do have a tip for you when it comes to cleaning the keys however, I put an old sock over my vacuum and run it along the keys and it picks up the dust and dirt in between the keys lovely.
Trust me, for what they're doing, $25 is a very good price. If they're cleaning your fans and vents, they're taking your laptop apart to get inside it, to properly clean it out. Which means putting it back together again also. Just trust me, you do not want to try doing this yourself. It's just such a huge hassle, and can often lead to you breaking the damn thing. So unless you're really confident, just pay them the money.
I am also currently struggling with figuring out a way to clean my computer. I travel with my laptop quite often attended Is a lot of dust. On a daily basis I have to get a cloth to clean my keyboard as I usually find it dusty every morning. Cleaning out your laptop is a long process but there are a lot of tutorials on YouTube that can help you on how to disassemble your laptop and put it back together. So I found that quite helpful and I intend on cleaning my laptop this way in the near future.
At any home improvement center like Lowes or Home Depot, they sell a can of compressed air. It is basically a can of pressurized air. Once you open it, it will force out air quickly. Could you use this to clean out the vents on your computer? I have seen people does this on the keyboards.
Thanks for all the good advice. I agree that $25 isn't too much to pay for cleaning out the air vents in a laptop, but I think it pays to ask around and see if there could be any better options. I will also have a look at youtube tutorials, as in the places where I travel, it is not always a forgone conclusion that there is someone around who can help me with my laptop if there is something wrong. So thanks again!
Your best bet is to use an air spray can. Some people like to use a vacuum, but it can give you problems with static electricity. If you are going to open up the case, be sure to look into safety measures, like wearing a safety bracelet. Even when unplugged, computers can be dangerous. More importantly, you might damage some component. My friend uses his wife's hair dryer turned on to cold. It has enough power to remove all the dust and fluff, but not sufficient to do any damage. It is really only the cooling fan inlet and the keyboard that should need cleaning as the rest of its box is well sealed. If you don't have air spray, then you can consider this. I have on occasions used a toothpick to clean the fan blades. There are a few options out there.
What have you decided to go with, if you don't mind my asking? I'd recommend just finding the shops and services which do this for you. There will even be services that allow you to send the laptop to them if you choose to. As Pfaemaster says, computers even they are unplugged can be dangerous and while you might think a Youtube tutorial is all you really need to perform a proper cleaning, you run the risk of damaging a component, and having no one to blame but yourself.
I usually just clean out the keyboard with a cloth too and i feel like that would be enough? I've been doing that for so long and so far my laptop is working okay. I'm not confident on pulling out contents of my laptop and putting them back together because I'm pretty sure I'll mess up the whole process even if I've watched tutorials countless times. But if you have the money, you might just use that for laptop cleaning and then maybe later on you'll watch youtube tutorial on how to do the cleaning on your own.
The best way to clean laptop is to give it for services. I think nobody else can do better job than them. I always give it for service and prefer not to give it to anyone else.
I recently bought a new laptop because my old one finally stopped working after four years. It was bought by my uncle as a gift for me when I graduated in high school and it was well used. However, I wasn't able to clean it properly because I didn't bother going to service centers. I was downright lazy to be honest. Anyway with this new laptop, I'm thinking of having it maintained every six months since I finally know how hard it is to not have one. I'm also planning on having my old one fixed so that my mom can use it for her movies, songs, and television series that she loves.
I'm not sure how to clean an entire laptop either. But to clean the keyboards, you can use the commonLog In that is being sold on Amazon. It's gooey and is really soft and rather sticky. It's not too expensive and lasts quite a long time. Use the cyber cleaner on difficult areas like the corners of the keys on your keyboards, and the back of the mouse, where dirt often gather. For anything else that requires dusting and special tools, special liquids or cleaning equipment, I think it's a lot more convenient to have someone else do it for you.
I learned what is acceptable to clean a laptop with and what is not the hard way. Our laptop gets dirty and collects dust really quickly ans easily. I once spilled a sticky substance on the keyboard. It wasn't much, and the keyboard was still working, so I just had to get the stickiness off of it. Silly me - I used Cif, which is a powerful cleaning agent, and it messed up everything. Even though we got the keyboard replaced, some of the keys are still swapped around, so if you pres six you'll get a seven. The man at the shop sold us some laptop cleaning foam, which is what you clean laptops with.
Buy a can of condensed air (not technically what it is), grab a screwdriver, and open up the laptop case. Spray the air with the little straw attached into each area of the case, especially the fans and vents. That's the best way to clean out your laptop, and anyone that says it's a difficult task to handle obviously has trouble getting simple things done. You'll then want to clean the exterior of the laptop with a light cleaning solution and cloth. It's as simple as that.
It is interesting that you should say this, simply because I have never actually cleaned or wanted to clean the insides of my laptop. Not that I would know how to lol. When I made my previous post, I had only been referring to the surface of the laptop. It can accumulate dust so easily and stains, especially if you eat food and watch movies or TV shows at the same time. I am always careful not to have anything spill on the laptop, but food/drink stains still manage to reach it, though I wipe them off straight away. When it comes to the insides of my laptop, then I will always let a professional handle it.
Downloading clean-up software programs for free is next to impossible as these types of software are usually for sale. I don't think I'm ready to invest that much just to free up space in my hard drives. My laptop has a built-in clean-up program so I try to take advantage of it though it's limited and a bit inefficient. I also defrag everything every few months after deleting those unnecessary files. It's worked for me so far.
I use a combination of a rag and a compressed air blower. Sometimes I dampen the rag slightly, and sometimes I just leave the rag completely dry. I gently brush the rag across my screen, across the keyboard, and maybe on the back as well. After that, I take the compressed air blower and I get in between the keys to get some of the dirt that has been caught up in there. My laptop always looks really clean after.
