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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?"
If you've already had a given strain of the flu, you generally won't catch it again; your immune system is primed against that virus. So the laptop is little danger to you. Your immediate family probably got exposed through a thousand other shared items, so the laptop isn't making things noticeably worse for them, either. In short, I wouldn't worry about it.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I'm no biologist but, casting my mind back to riveting documentaries on the BBC...
Your body comes in contact with a new strain of a virus that it has no defense against. The virus moves in. The virus multiplies. Your body figures out how to fight it. Much of your feeling like crap is the process of your body fighting it.
If you get re-exposed in any kind of a short time frame, your body already knows how to produce the antibodies and doesn't get reinfected.
The reason you'll pick up multiple colds during a winter is because you're getting hit by multiple strains.
If re-exposure to the exact same strain was an issue, you'd have to burn your house down every time you got sick. Instead, the things you've come in to contact with are no risk to you, just to others who may not have immunity to that strain yet.
That being the case... Get over yourself, stop being a germophobe, use your laptop just fine.
If other people are using your laptop, they may have something to worry about. You're totally fine.
As for you using other people's stuff and being a raging germophobe, you can use sterilizing hand lotions after every usage... and you too can become one of the idiotic generation that try so hard to avoid any exposure that all they really achieve is having no built up immunity when things do get through.
Man up, get over your phobia, accept that getting sick is a normal part of building a tougher immune system, and get on with living.
Even if they live a while, Timothy has already had this strain and is likely immune, no?
Put identity in the browser.
No offence to people who are actually retarded, but;
Are you retarded?
and as a follow up question to slashdot editors:
Are YOU retarded?
Worst. "Ask Slashdot." EVAR...
Sheesh...
Windows is not the answer.
Windows is the question.
The answer is "NO."
You are typically contagious before you feel sick. The feeling sick part usually happens AFTER your body has begun to mount an immune response, the sick feeling being all the cytokines and such, being released and their effect on the body.
Besides that - you've alreay "caught" it, and are no longer susceptible to that strain. Your other members of the household might still catch it though. And, yes, generally the bugs/viruses don't stay "live" that long outside the body. Most are dead within 72 hours or so.
..........FULL STOP.
I'd be wary. In the current terror craze, you might get arrested for trying to wipe out the airport personnel with biological weapons.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I say get a freakin' life and don't worry about germs so much. If you've already had it, the germs on your laptop aren't going to re-infect you. (You're immune to that strain.) Also, germs only live so long on surfaces...
For cripes sake you might want to look into getting your OCD and germ phobia looked into though. :)
It's kind of a sad day and age when this gets modded insightful. Don't you agree? Nothing against the poster - its a reflection of society these days.