How to Safely Clean Your Keyboard

There is something that worthwhile that I learned about cleaning my keyboard, and it cost me two of them. One was thrown in the trash and got messier than before, and kept the other one, still in working condition, but barely. The one I kept helped me as a reminder of the mistake I have made. On February 25, 2007, when I had an eMachines desktop keyboard, it started to get full of gunk, junky, dirty, and sticky. I had never experienced this kind of keyboard before. Normally this never happened to me before, but in this case, it's my first time. Since I had no experience, I decided to clean the black keyboard all over, keys and keyboard alike. I was getting desperate anyway, so I had to try something. Better than nothing at all. I decided to try this experiment, in which not only do I say "Do not try this at home", but "if you love your computer and your keyboard, do not bathe them!" Here's the recipe for tech disaster:

Ingredients:

-One small, narrow foam cup
-One gigantic (glass) cup
-One grungy, sticky PC keyboard
-Water (hot or boiling)
-One or two bottles of dishwashing detergent or liquid soap
-One dull butter knife
-One precise chart of keyboard layout

Instructions to bathe and cripple your keyboard:

-Pry the nasty keys from the keyboard with the butter knife, but be careful and gentle; not too much force or the keys will crack, snap and break
-Make sure the lights are on in your room to see very well; if you force the keys out, it'll vanish for a while and land on the floor with a "plink!"
-Place keys in gigantic (glass cup), but don't drop it!
-Take cup and keyboard to any sink in the bathroom or kitchen (preferably the kitchen)
-Turn on hot water over the keyboard and let it run over
-If you want, you can find a keyboard-sized pan and place the keyboard inside it; find one or two pots and fill hot water in them; turn on the burners (flame or spiral coil) and wait for the water to boil; when the desired boiling point is reached, pour inside pan with keyboard, and add 2/10ths of dishwashing detergent or liquid soap (pour it in the boiling water, and stir with butter knife). Let it soak, as the heat will dissipate and loosen any stickiness and kill any bacteria; put a pan on top of it to keep heat in.
-Pour hot/boiling water in the small foam cup, and add same amount of soap in it; then pour it in big (glass) cup
-Repeat this step with 1/10ths of liquid soap or dishwashing detergent now until big cup is semi-full
-Stir with butter knife with increasing speed, but not too much the keys will fly out
-Let the keys soak the same way with keyboard for one hour
-Take both out of the now-lukewarm water-soap mixture, and put keyboard upside down to drain the water remaining in there; let keys dry after pouring all of the water out
-When dry, snap the keys back in the keyboard
-If you have good memory of keyboard, remember the places where they belong. If not, find a precise keyboard chart from the internet, and let it be your map for the key placement
-When finished, plug cleaned keyboard into computer after drying off
-Although you have a happy, squeaky-clean keyboard, as good as new, you messed it up on the inside! Keyboards are like cats and kittens; they do not like to be externally bathed to get cleaned.
-One piece of advice though: make sure you cover up your keyboard before eating near it, or don't eat near it at all and let crumbs fall in the crevices and spaces of the keyboard.

So avoid doing any of this at all costs except for covering it up after much use, and buy a spare keyboard, just in case!