Cleaning my Keyboard: A Photo Journey

There comes a time in every computer-superuser's life when he just gets so overly frustrated and disgusted by the mess that exists underneath his keys. All of those black hairs and crumbs from god knows what sitting under there every time i press a key. all that filth. it made me sick sometimes. i just wanted that feeling of unclogging a drain, or cleaning an artery, or picking your nose. so, lo and behold, here is my photo adventure:

I started out taking each key off. My computer has a cool onscreen keyboard that has the exact same layout as the piece of shit i use so it made putting it back together a lot easier. Here are some shots of taking the keys off. You can see here how dirty and disgusting it was.


After a little preliminary cleaning i got it to look like this:


I used a variety of techniques. Cotton balls and Q-tips covered with proactiv revitalizing toner worked the best. Also, baby wipes to get some of the bulk was good too. It was a disgusting project, filled with hair, dust, crumbs and an assortment of crusty and crunchy oddities stuck somehow to the bottom of the keypad. Heres a few final shots of the thing:


Final thoughts: It definitely was not worth it. Most of my keys have small chips and are bent in weird spots from where the screwdriver pryed them off. Also, the spacebar, arrow keys and backspace keys dont work nearly as good as they used to for some reason. I used to be able to hold the backspace key down and have it delete text pretty quickly, now it does it so slow that its more efficient to press the key a hundred times. same thing goes for the arrow keys and page scrolling. The spacebar however doesnt work every time i press it. its like loose in certain areas and doesnt work unless i sorta hit it harder then usual. overall it was a big waste of time, but at least its clean.