Other than ... swiping at the monitor screen with a tissue, or licking your finger and smudging an annoying speck around, when’s the last time you thought about cleaning your computer equipme
Other than occasionally swiping at the monitor screen with a tissue, or licking your finger and smudging an annoying speck around, when’s the last time you thought about cleaning your computer equipment?
If you’re like most users, you haven’t. Yet preventive maintenance should be a part of owning a computer. When kept clean, equipment lasts longer, repair bills are reduced, work spaces look neater, and output is more reliable.
Have you ever looked inside your system case? Dust migrates into pc cases, brought in by the cooling fan intake. Dirt accumulates especially fast if the user is a smoker, or if the system resides in a dirty, dusty environment.
Tech Essentials CPU Filters (#77-001) prevent dust from being sucked into the case. A peel-off back lets you easily place one over all your fan intakes.
It’s easy to tell when the filter requires changing. After you’ve changed one and seen the built-up crud, you won’t want to leave your system unprotected again.
You’re probably thinking "Aw, I don’t need any fancy filters on my intake. I’ll just open the case and vacuum it out, or better yet, just blow on it."
Ask any experienced technician if you should "blow out" the dust from inside your case.
DON’T!
The dust will settle into the slots on your motherboard. Dust will conduct static electricity, and nine times out of ten your motherboard will blow as soon as power is applied. Your experienced technician has already done this, and that’s how s/he knows.
Floppy disks and drives are particularly susceptible. As printed in the inaugural issue of The Tech Essential "tiny dust particles can be like BOULDERS when reading media."
And at one time or another almost every user has seen the "Disk cannot be read" message when trying to access a favourite CD. CD Wipe (#40-103) is a lint-free static neutralizing cloth that will also work on mesh computer screens.
For hard-to-reach places like inside drives, and in the recesses of printers, Tech Essentials has multi-purpose, pre-moistened, lint-free, dual-tipped swabs (#77-612).
While anyone who’s ever changed a cartridge knows it’s effect on clothing, laser toner dust buildup is also a destructive element on printers. A Toner Wipe (#66-740) with special toner-grabbing fibres will pick up toner residue.
Laser printer/copier/laser fax cleaning paper (#32-125) is placed on the top of a paper input tray and fed through your copier, fax, or printer a few times after changing a toner cartridge, or after a large number of copies have been printed.
When was the last time you wiped down that mousepad? Was it after you munched the entire bag of chips while waiting for your email client to download that giant South Park animation your friend sent?
Instead of smearing your finger juice all over your monitor screen, try the View Control (#50-010). It’s a pre-moistened wipe with anti-static properties for cleaning sensitive surfaces. It smells clean, too.
If it’s not your monitor that’s dirty, try U.C. Clear (#10-010) on your glasses. It’s also for cleaning copier, scanner, and microfiche glass, camera, telescope, and microscope lenses, and tape heads.
Wet and Dry PowerBook Glare Filter Wipes (#50-424) are for use on sensitive coatings, soft screens, and anti-glare surfaces.
A large part of Tech Essentials business involves supplying pre-moistened, lint-free cards (#95-050) for cleaning credit card readers in optical and magnetic stripe equipment.
Many items of the Tech Essentials line are purchased in bulk with an organization logo printed on, then given away as promotional items that are actually useful.
Clean computers and peripherals last longer and perform better. As Captain Planna says: "A clean machine produces clean results."
