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?"

Comments

Re:UV light

[linzeal]

Yeah it is night and day for my girlfriend and my laptops. I love sunlight and often go out and use my laptop outside and she has taken to using her laptop mostly as a 1000 dollar radio inside her dark writers loft. Her laptop is simply something I will not touch as it has been on top of a messy food strewn desk or kept at her side while we eat at the kitchen table more often than ever been taken to school or work or play in the wide expanse of the outside world. The last time I cleaned out her laptop in march I wore latex gloves and taking it completely apart discovered that there were graham cracker crumbs inside the fan housing for the CPU and 1000's of particles of food and detritus; some of which had mold appearing to grow on it, ewww. My solution was compressed air than wiping it down with Lysol as others have suggested but it is pretty disgusting again after only 4 months. If you want to stop worrying about germs I would suggest washing your hands more with good old soap and water as well as to STOP EATING at the damn keyboard. God, I hope the GF doesn't read this.

Re:Set it out in the Sun

[Squalish]

Speaking very, very generally, the broader spectrum and the higher dose the poison (whatever the poison - animal, vegetable, or mineral), the more difficult it is for a population to evolve resistance against it. Bleach kills almost everything - it's a broad-spectrum disinfectant precisely because organisms have found such difficulty in evolving defenses against a bleachy environment. A very narrow-spectrum poison, perhaps a bioengineered virus which targets a single strand of DNA present in 20% of the population for its high lethality, quickly finds itself going up against organisms which are resistant to its spread. In a generation or two, most of those organisms are dead or have developed antibodies against it, or, in many creatures, have inherited antibodies against it from their mothers. The population routes around the problem, because avoiding that strand of DNA is necessary for survival. Against a wider spectrum poison like high temperatures, a hugely unlikely, very complicated system of heat disposal might be required for any of the population to survive. UV tolerance is relatively easy in human beings (it's been estimated that a thousand years in a different environment is enough to change a population's skin color entirely, from opposing evolutionary pressures involving essential nutrients dark skin can't make, and essential nutrients sunburnt, dead skin can't make), but only because we as large multicellular animals have evolved multiple redundant structures to deal with it - fur/hair, thick layers of dead skin on back and shoulders, variable melanin production adjustable by multiple genes, external means like clothes, houses, hats, and forest canopies, and even short-term adaptations like temporary melanin production during tanning.

Re:UV light

[phantomlord]

Not all viruses die in a dry environment. When my dad was in the hospital for 5 months back in 1998, he was colonized by VRE. When Infectious Disease came to talk to us about it, they said that it will stay alive on virtually any surface for an indefinite amount of time. I've also heard that MRSA acts the same way. The only way to kill it is by sterilization.