Cleaning Internal parts help

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SudburyOntario

Gawd
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May 5, 2008
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I have just run a laptop keyboard under hot water to clean all the gunk I could get at ( after I took the keys and tabs off of course ).. I am not going to plug it in for a few days to make sure it is dry, however would anyone else attemp this ?

I just do not have the patience to clean a kayboard which has been heavily dirty from previous owners.


Next I have always wondered why ?! When you remove the heat sink from a laptop processor there is this : Heat sink - thermal pad - tin foil square - processor ?

What is the purpose of this tin foil, I am thinking about removing it and just using AS5 ( or white grease since the mobile processors have surface contacts.

Before I short my fuse, I applied thermal paste between the tin foil and processor, Acer Aspire 5000 has not turned off anymore. ( I think that's why the screen got broken lol ).
 
SudburyOntario said:
I have just run a laptop keyboard under hot water to clean all the gunk I could get at ( after I took the keys and tabs off of course ).. I am not going to plug it in for a few days to make sure it is dry, however would anyone else attemp this ?

).
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Did you remove the keyboard from the laptop and just run water over the keyboard itself? I'm assuming you did since you're working with the processor. Personally I would use alcohol and not water.
 
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Yes I did remove it first, After cleaning the first one on the gateway, I thought as much to take a short cut this time... it was very dirty so I would have run out of alcoholic cleaner.

I also seen your post before you made the edit.. I really have no clue about the heat sink issue lol
 
Wow. Um, just wow.

There are a variety of non-conductive cleaners out there that are far superior to water and alcohol for cleaning the gunk off of a laptop. When doing a project like this, it is a good idea to invest some time and money and head over to your local radio shack and buy some pcb cleaner. It will do a much better job of cleaning all the components and it won't damage anything.
 
holymoo said:
Wow. Um, just wow.
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What's the attitude problem? This is completely normal to do! On The Screen Savers (probably while you were still in diapers), they talked about giving your keyboard a bath all the time. I've done it several times and it works great to get keys unstuck. I've also taken the keypad off the keyboard and just done that to spare the electronic components and that is obviously safer. As long as you let it completely dry before plugging it in, it's completely safe since there is no current while it's unplugged.
 
It's a tad harder to seperate the keyboard elements when working with a laptop keyboard. To holymoo, I have worked on several laptops but this time I want to take a quick route for cleaning the keyboards - which usually puts the entire project off.

I usually find that once inside some Acer Aspire laptops, the casing tends to fall apart where the screws hold it together. Must be old cheap plastic. Has anyone tried the new crazy glue made for bonding things with gaps ?
 
While Leo Laporte is a great source of information on servicing computers a standard desktop keyboard is constructed differently from a laptop keyboard.

Most desktop keyboards today are made with pressure sensitive circuits embedded inside of a elastic case. Then again, the only keyboard around when I was in diapers was on typewriter (which also need to avoid water.) Though laptops new and old retain a mechanical based system which leaves the circuits open to the air for space reasons.

While I have no doubt that SudburyOntario's keyboard will be working in a few days, adding water to the components introduces some new problems. The most obvious problem that this introduces is corrosion. This will present it some time down the line where he'll have a problem using one or multiple keys.

In addition to causing corrosion water also acts as a solvent breaking down the pcb comprising the integrity of the circuits. This compounded with the mineral content of your average home's water supply does not make a great environment for the laptop keyboard.

To avoid all of this I recommended a non-conductive pcb cleaner. While SudburyOntario may not be clean the pcb itself, I can't neglect the fact that some of the solvent will be getting on the board.

The reason why I made my outburst was because "giving you keyboard a bath" has somewhat gone out of style because canned air and some dry silicone lubricant does a much better job. As a result I was hoping that people were starting to go back to the concept that generally water is bad for you components. Anyway, I'm sorry to OP and the other posters for this rant. I hope that this provide sufficient reasoning for my suggestion as well as my outburst.
 
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SudburyOntario said:
Yes I did remove it first, After cleaning the first one on the gateway, I thought as much to take a short cut this time... it was very dirty so I would have run out of alcoholic cleaner.

I also seen your post before you made the edit.. I really have no clue about the heat sink issue lol
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I edited that in my original post because it's an assumption. I think the tin foil acts as a heat spreader, better dissipation. Also in regards to the other poster, don't knock alcohol as a cleaner, it's actually very good and non conductive. If you can get the 90% stuff that's the best and i've never damaged anything with it.
 
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I just realized, I did not answer your second question. The reason why they use the aluminum foil in conjunction with pad is to offer better thermal efficiency. In the design of the computer, the developer need to meet a distance set by their manufacturing equipment between the heatsink and the processor. Since their supply of pads are only so many millimeters high, they can supplement the height of the thermal pad with a strip of aluminum foil.

That being said, if you can make it work, products like artic silver and such offer and better thermal efficiency than the pad and aluminum foil.
 
Indeed, I can understand your grasp of how the water will start to eat away at the pcb and initially break down the circuits. Perhaps canned air and swabs are are good idea, but when it's not making a difference at removing the stuck on dirt, I opted out for my old tooth brush and water.

At most I suppose I could run some secondary cleaner to help aid the removal of the water & solvents.
 
Well, it one of those things that you pick it up and it will last almost forever because you'll only use it once in a while.
 
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