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Cleanliness is next to Godliness, remember?

OK, maybe you’re an atheist. In which case cleanliness is better than broke-down -computerness.

You need to clean your computer, but you need to do it intelligently or the cleaning process will do more damage than the gunk and dust you’re cleaning off.

Here’s a basic list of what you need to have around:

· Cleaning cloths — lint-free and ideally static free, you can get these cheap at any office supply place
· Water — distilled if you want to be anal but any old water will do
· Alcohol — rubbing alcohol. You can but usually should not use other solvents, which can damage plastics and dyes (we rubbed the letters right off a keyboard in about 1987 and had a hard lesson in just how poor our touch-typing skills are)
· Portable mini vacuum designed for cleaning electronics — around $20 for a simple one, don’t use a home vacuum as there is too much air pressure and also potentially dangerous static
· Cotton swabs OR BETTER YET
· Foam swabs — lint and static free
· CD-ROM cleaning disc
· Windex

For monitors and screens you may want to invest in cleaner designed for that purpose, which may work better than plain alcohol, but alcohol when used as below will not hurt them.

How Often To Clean?

If you are following our other advice, and keeping pets, smoke, food and general mayhem away from your equipment, a cleaning about twice a year should do fine. If you have environmental contaminants like smoke or pets, or a lot of dust, probably quarterly would be wise.

In any case this is not a weekly kind of routine, so don’t get stressed.

What To Clean?

You want to clean up every element of the system that will tend to get dirty enough to pose a potential problem. This includes: Cases, drives, input devices, LCD screens, monitors, the internal components of the computer including the fan and boards.

Never spray anything directly on anything. Put any liquid (water, alcohol, Windex, whatever) on a cloth, wipe or swab before applying it. Avoid solvents.

Clean the case

Wipe down all surfaces with a slightly damp (water) lint-free cloth. You should avoid using any solvents including alcohol on plastics if you can. If you have really stubborn stains adding a SMALL amount of dish detergent can help, and won’t hurt the case. Vacuum at all open areas and around the fan.

Clean the drives

For CD and DVD drives, just run the CD-ROM cleaner. This is disc with tiny brushes that will clean the lenses and in some cases motors as well.

For floppy drives (if you have any!) you can buy an inexpensive kit for the purpose. If you don’t want the kit you need to open up the drive and clean the heads, much like you would on an old cassette deck, but we’re not recommending that!
Clean the (desktop) keyboard and mouse

Here too you can wipe down all surfaces with a slightly damp (water) lint-free cloth. You should avoid using any solvents including alcohol on plastics if you can. Next use compressed air and blast gently along each row of keys. You may be surprised how much dust and hair flies out. You can vacuum a keyboard, but make sure to use a nozzle attachment small enough not to suck any of your keys

For an optical mouse just wipe off the finger smudges with a damp cloth. For a ball or trackball mouse, open the case (this is usually a quarter turn of a disc) and remove the ball. Use a cotton or foam swab dipped in alcohol to clean the crud off the internal rollers.

Clean the screen (s)

A glass CRT monitor can be cleaned with a little Windex or alcohol, like any glass surface. An LCD screen can be safely cleaned with a small amount of alcohol, but not any other solvent. While there are “screen cleaners” available and they work well, some adding anti-static properties, LCD screens are actually cleaned with alcohol by the computer companies who then tell you not to use alcohol to clean them. If you’re worried, you can use a very slightly water-dampened cloth.

“Backing Up Is For Sissies”

That’s a funny slogan from the latter days of the “insider” era of computing, an in-joke among computer geeks who were trying to assert that being a computer geek doesn’t mean you can’t be tough.

Being a computer geek — excuse us, Internet entrepreneur — does mean that you shouldn’t be stupid however, and not backing up is just plain dumb, especially these days when the tools and technologies to do it are so easy and so cheap.

Hardware and software options

The world of backing up is primarily about storage, and the storage marketplace is moving so quickly it would be a waste of both of our time for us to list out X equipment at Y price.

As a simple example, there is a pocket hard-drive called the Giga Bank. About a year ago, a 2.2 GB Giga Bank — at the time a wonder of miniaturization — cost about $150. Today a 4 GB Giga Bank is around $89. By the time you read this, they’ll have the next one out.

It’s probably more useful to talk about general ways and means of backing up (or if you prefer, replicating or archiving data). Archiving is not the same as backing up, but you may find doing some of both useful.

We’ll discuss a couple of general concepts about having multiple sets of data, and a little about the hardware and software options for creating and accessing them.

Backing up versus archiving

Backing up means keeping copies of stuff you currently need or use in a second or third place, so if the one you have on hand gets destroyed, you have another one. You want backups pretty easily accessible at all times.

Archiving on the other hand usually means removing data files from a high-traffic place (like your C drive) and putting it somewhere in storage, in case you ever need to look at it again, which you may well not but you want to have the stuff safely stored in case.

Accordingly, backing up is something you do routinely — probably weekly or more, or even several times a day if you have high-volume transaction heavy businesses. Whereas archiving you only do once in a while, like you might do each year, if you do projects on an annual basis. You might not need your 2004 projects on your desktop in 2007, but you might need them tucked away someplace.