Cleaning and Maintaining Your Devices Safely

Dust is the maintenance that matters. It insulates components, blocks airflow, and causes the overheating that makes machines throttle and shortens their life. Nearly everything else marketed as maintenance does considerably less.

Screens

Power off first, so you can see the marks and avoid pressing buttons.

A dry microfibre cloth removes most of it.

For anything that remains: a cloth barely dampened with water, or a solution made for screens. Wipe, then dry with a second cloth.

Never spray directly onto the screen. Liquid runs to the edges and gets behind the bezel, and that is how screens are destroyed.

Never use: alcohol at high concentration, ammonia-based glass cleaner, household surface spray, paper towel, or anything abrasive. Modern screens have coatings that these strip, and the damage is permanent and visible.

Press lightly. Pressure on an LCD panel can damage it.

Keyboards

Turn it upside down and shake gently to remove the loose debris. This does most of it.

Compressed air for the rest. Short bursts, at an angle rather than straight down, which pushes debris out rather than deeper.

Between keys: a soft brush, or a cotton bud slightly dampened with isopropyl alcohol.

Keycaps come off on most mechanical and many membrane keyboards, and this allows a proper clean. Photograph the layout first, use a keycap puller rather than pulling by hand, and note that larger keys have stabilisers that are awkward to refit.

Do not remove keycaps on a laptop unless you know the mechanism. Laptop key clips are fragile and frequently unavailable as spares.

After a liquid spill: power off immediately, disconnect, turn upside down to drain, and do not turn it on. A desktop keyboard can frequently be rinsed and dried thoroughly over days. A laptop needs professional attention, and rice does not work.

Mice and trackpads

A cloth with a little isopropyl alcohol for the surfaces.

The sensor window on the underside — a dry cotton bud. Dust here causes erratic tracking, and it is the first thing to check when a mouse behaves oddly.

The feet accumulate grime that makes gliding rough.

Scroll wheels collect debris in the mechanism. Compressed air, and a cotton bud around the edges.

Vents, fans and inside the case

The part that actually affects performance.

Every six to twelve months, more in a dusty home or one with pets.

Power off and unplug. For a desktop, hold the power button afterwards to discharge residual power.

Work outside, or the dust ends up in the room.

Compressed air in short bursts. Hold fans still with a finger while blowing — spinning them beyond their rated speed can damage the bearing and, on some fans, generate current back into the board.

Vacuum cleaners are not recommended for the inside of a machine, because of static. A vacuum held near the exhaust to catch what you blow out is fine.

Laptops: blow into the vents. Opening a laptop for a proper clean is worthwhile and it varies enormously in difficulty by model.

The clogged heatsink is what causes a laptop to run hot and slow. Dust forms a mat between the fan and the fins, and blowing through the vent frequently does not clear it. Opening the machine and removing the mat by hand is the fix.

Thermal paste

Between processor and cooler, and it dries out over years.

Worth replacing if temperatures have risen noticeably and cleaning the dust has not helped. Not something to do routinely.

Requires removing the cooler, cleaning both surfaces with isopropyl alcohol, and applying a small amount of fresh paste. Straightforward on a desktop, considerably harder on a laptop.

What to check periodically

Beyond cleaning, five things that take a few minutes.

Fans still spinning. A failed fan is silent, and silence is exactly what people fail to notice. Look while the machine is running.

Temperatures under load, with monitoring software. Establish what normal looks like for your machine so you can tell when it changes.

Drive health, through SMART reporting. Reallocated sectors and read errors are warnings.

Free space. A drive close to full slows the whole system, particularly on solid state drives which need free space to manage writes. Keep at least ten to fifteen percent free.

Backups actually working. Not just configured — restore a file occasionally and confirm it works. See backing up your data.

What is not worth doing

Defragmenting a solid state drive. Achieves nothing and consumes write cycles. Modern systems handle this automatically and correctly.

Registry cleaners. No measurable benefit and a real risk of breaking things.

Most "optimisation" and "speed booster" software. The genuine optimisations — removing startup programs, freeing space, updating — you can do yourself.

Frequent full antivirus scans, beyond what the built-in protection does automatically.

Replacing thermal paste annually.

A realistic schedule

Monthly: wipe the screen and keyboard, check free space, glance at whether fans are audible and normal.

Every six months: compressed air through vents and fans, check temperatures under load, check drive health, test that a backup restores.

Annually: proper internal clean on a desktop, and consider opening a laptop if it runs hot.

When needed: thermal paste, if temperatures have climbed and cleaning did not help.

The short version

Dust is the maintenance that matters. Everything else is secondary.

Never spray liquid onto a screen and never use household glass cleaner — the coating damage is permanent.

Hold fans still while blowing compressed air, and work outside.

A laptop that runs hot and slow usually has a clogged heatsink, and blowing through the vent frequently will not clear it.

And check that fans still spin — a failed one is silent, which is why nobody notices.

For practical baseline security guidance for home users, see CISA Secure Our World.