I have an old Razer Blackwidow Something Something keyboard that I use on my main computer and for the last [long period of time] I’ve been looking at it and thinking, “that keyboard is really dirty, I should clean it” except I never did that because the computer was always turned on at the time.
Well the other day we had a scheduled power outage and the power wasn’t going to be on for a few hours. Uncharacteristically, I decided to get off my backside and do something about it.
I pulled off the top cover and, oh god, it was revolting. You might be able to see the picture so I don’t need to go into details but it was bad. I took it outside to brush away most of the detritus. Many of the hairs had to be physically removed one at a time because they had lodged between the switch flanges and the mounting frame.
Once that delightful task was completed, I went over the board with cotton tips to scrub away the residue that was more persistent. That got the board looking reasonably cleaned, so I turned my attention to the key caps.
I tipped them into the sink with some water and detergent and gave them a good scrub with a cloth. After a rinse I laid them out on a fluffy towel to soak up the bulk of the water. Then I turned them over and ran the hot air gun over them gently, but the bulk of the drying was done and I left them to dry naturally after that.
I gave the top of the case a wash as well before starting to replace the keys. I’d taken a couple of photos of the keyboard before disassembly to help with positioning the keys. A strange thing happens with my phone: the first photo I take usually comes out as a little thumbnail, instead of a full sized photo and of course I keep forgetting that, so one of the reference photos was not particularly useful.
Anyway, I got the key caps back in place and reassembled the keyboard without any more issues. And you know what? It actually feels a lot nicer using a clean keyboard. It’s almost as if I have an exciting new keyboard, don’t know why that should be the case but it just feels much more civilised typing on a keyboard that doesn’t have dust and hair all over it.
