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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?"
Then you won't have to worry about it.
for the crippling virus infecting their machines.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Just spray some Lysol on a rag and wipe it down. If you are really worried, you could spray the machine directly, but I'd be concerned of damage.
Keyboard + Mouse + Sunlight. 30 minutes later it's clean.
I could be wrong, but I doubt that germs live very long on plastic.
I don't respond to AC's.
Set it out in the sunshine for about ten minutes. Sunlight is a great disinfectant
Enjoy Every Sandwich
Use the gentlest cleanser you can (the cleaner they sell for lcd televisions works pretty well), a microfiber cloth (not wet, just damp), and go over it once, let it dry, go over it again, let it dry, then a little bit of sunshine really does help kill germs.
Sounds like you might have been exposed to hypochondria as well. You should go to a specialist and have that checked out right away.
Use a condom?
;)
I kid, I kid.
Bye bye karma
Get some cotton balls wet with rubbing alcohol, something with a high concentration (e.g. > 70%). Rub it all over your laptop. Wait about 2 minutes and all of it will evaporate, and your laptop will be clean. I use this on my keyboard/mice/macbook all the time.
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.
Just wait a day or two. The germs will die, you shouldn't get sick again since you just got done fighting it, and if your wife's going to get sick, I don't think the MacBook is going to be the reason why.
Goo goo g'joob.
Now that you have survived, and, correct me if I am wrong - but aren't you immune now to that virus?
That said, I'd say damp (as in no drips possible) cloth made damp by some soapy water to wipe it down ought to do the trick. The mantra in my EMT class (and a number of test questions) was "The best way to avoid spreading disease is to wash your hands often".
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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.
Felix Unger posts on slashdot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's the only way to be sure.
Updating your virus definitions?
First, turn off the laptop. The aluminum casing of the MacBook Pro can withstand wiping with Lysol, the active ingredient of which is benzalkonium chloride in a low concentration. Do not saturate the surface, but do leave it damp for a few minutes--then go back and wipe down with water. For the screen, simply wipe with distilled water. Use the black cleaning cloth that came with your computer--it is included in the same package as the installation disks.
Under no circumstances should you use anything other than water to clean the display.
If you are *really* paranoid, leave the computer out in bright sun for 30 minutes. While this is not really an "official" way of disinfecting things, the UVB rays could have enough energy to disrupt the activity of bacteria and viruses. If you were really serious about this approach, you'd get a dedicated UVC disinfection unit which would irradiate your laptop. But I don't know what that might do to the hardware. *shrug*
The point is, if you've been coughing as a result of your illness, you've already spread live viral particles all over the place. It's not all that useful to think about sterilization when your living environment is teeming with all kind of infectious organisms--not just viruses, but bacteria and fungi.
You really don't want to give your nasties to anyone, so I would recommend this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piranha_solution
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
I heard that's fairly immune to virus's.
Just sell it on eBay. Problem solved.
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.
Install an Antivirus...
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Please take a look
The primary issue is that of the severity of the virus or bacteria, not keeping it clean. At best, you can disinfect the surfaces, not the interior. And although it sounds gross, you probably sneezed on, or near, the unit. Perhaps there was some moisture on your fingers when you touched the drive bay, or maybe you got your sickly hands on a CD before you inserted it, spraying fine droplets of moisture through out the unit.
As long as it is something normalish like the Flu, Cold, Chicken Pox, etc . . . just give it time. Most of that stuff dies in 24-36 hours without a host.
If its something horrifying, like Ebola? Stick your electronic item in the oven, put it on "Self-Clean", and get a new one. Discard the ash in a biohazard box ;-)
You'll never, ever, ever, ever succeed at "disinfecting" consumer electronics, because they are never sealed well enough. About the best you can do is those Virtually Indestructible Keyboard&Mice. Anything else just isn't cleanable, and you should do your best to maintain good hygiene (wipe the keyboard and unit every now and then with a good alcohol wipe (or spray alcohol on a paper towel)), and get over the "scariness" of illness.
Furthermore, if its your family your worried about, you've already given them ample opportunity to get infected, if you shared utensils, a bed, skin contact (Hugs and Kisses, anyone?) or even an indoor environment.
Disease isn't that scary unless you or someone you know immune system's compromised, and in that case you should turn to a health care professional to figure out how to make your environment safe. Otherwise, get over it ;-)
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
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. :)
Use a little bit of Ethanol. I used to work in a lab where we had to handle Staphylococcus Aureus. We continously sprayed Ethanol on the counters and lab equipment. It kills the vast majority of bacteria, evaporates quickly, and leaves no residue. The more serious disinfecting required heating the equipment in an autoclave. But, we were dealing with large quantities of live, mutant strains. A little bit of Ethnol should be more than adequate.
No, this is relevant. The article deals with a serious problem: a mania for disinfection in the USA.
After years of expensive advertising by many companies, for many products, in many media, after many years, finally S. C. Johnson & Co. have convinced a substantial number of people that the terrorists, oops, sorry, I mean germs are a huge threat -- HUGE! -- and they are just about to overwhelm us; that we desperately need the help of sophisticated surveillance, oops, sorry, I mean, chemicals to stave off our all-but-certain doom. It's our last hope, our only hope.
Lies, lies, lies.
I'm a doctor, and we use laptops in our office, instead of paper charts. So I carry a laptop around all day long while I see patients.
Personally, I tend to wipe my laptop down every once in a while (maybe twice a week) with some disinfectant wipes, though I only do this when some sort of liquid gets on it.
As for your question, onces your laptop has had a few hours to air out, it's probably safe. Most viruses don't live for very long out in the open, although live isn't really the right term. Once they are dry, they are pretty much going to be inactivated. They are usually spread through little droplets that get on your hands, objects, etc. Those droplets then have to get into you (your mouth, eyes, nose etc) in order to infect you. If there are little virus-containing droplets on your laptop, they will pretty quickly dry out and become inactive.
Frequent handwashing is the best thing that you can do to avoid transmitting diseases. It reduces the chances that you will spread something from you to objects around you, and also reduce the chances that you will infect yourself after touching contaminated objects.
Just to address a couple other issues in the replies to this post:
A previous infetion usually protects you from a repeat infection. For instance, you are probably not going to get chicken pox twice. On the other hand, there are several strains of influenza, and those strains mutate each season. So you can get infected year after year, which is why there are annual flu shots. Or in the example of common colds, there are many different viruses which cause cold symptoms, and each of them may have several strains. So you can get lots of colds over the course of your life, even if you are immune to some of the viruses you have been exposed to in the past.
And one last thing - I'm just going to repeat how important it is to wash your hands a lot if you don't want to get sick. In the winter, I might see 25-30 patients a day, most of whom have colds of some sort. I probably wash my hands 50 or so times a day (before and efter each patient) and I don't get sick any more than anyone else.
Shingles can be more painful than childbirth, according to an article I read when I had it 4 years ago. When the rash develops, you have to get the antiviral within a day or you will want to die during the worse part. I had to take the drug for about 8 weeks due to lingering pain.
1) if you coughed or sprayed on the laptop chance are you've spread mucus under the keys. A UV (or any other) light shone on top of the keys will do nothing to bugs under the caps.
2) See previous /. posts about cleaning keyboards in a dishwasher. It works. Your MAC manual has directions for removing your keyboard easily or check the many MAC repair websites with video on how to remove your KB.. Let dry 2 hours in washer, then overnight in dry air (under 15% relative humidity). If it's rainy use a hairdryer on LOW, stay 8" from the plastic (duh!), wait 15 min and repeat. Repeat again, and wait overnight to re-install. Your KB should now be dry and clean as new. One caveat -- never pull directly on any thin wires or you WILL be sorry, sorry, sorry. Use tweezers
3) Second the alcohol wipes. Use the 90% ethyl if you can find it, 70% ethyl second choice, then follow up with 90% isopropyl. IMHO 70% isopropyl is useless.
4) Still worried? Call around to local hospitals and veterinarians (houskeeping and surgical dept are the place to start) and find one that practices "Cold" or "Gas" sterilization. you doctor may also do this in his/her office or know someone who knows someone...
5) Do you use a cellphone too?
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
Don't worry about it. There isn't a virus yet that can make the leap from biological to technological infection. Your laptop is perfectly safe.
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Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
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Windex + Paper Towels on keyboard, screen, outside, and power cord. Then a bit of water on another towel to get rid of any residue from the windex. I don't do it because of germs, I do it because I don't like the feeling of an oily keyboard from sweaty, greasy hands.
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