For most people, their laptop is an incredibly important tool, but for me, it's literally my main way to experience the outside world. But, I spent a month not being able to use my laptop, so when I pulled it back out, I decided to give it quite a bit of TLC.

When using wipes to clean your laptop, please please be careful. Anything bleach or acetone based will melt and warp plastics, and destroy the coatings on your screen. I use n-Butoxypropanol wipes (such as glasses cleaners - I personally use OptiClear) because they work well on both screens and plastics, and because glasses are so easily scratching, I know they're kind to coatings. But for laptop screens, you can absolutely just wipe the screen with a dry microfibre cloth to clear smudges and use distilled water on a cloth, a tiny amount, and just wipe it very carefully in circles. For plastics, you can also use eucalyptus oil cleaners, they're kind to plastics while clearing dirt easily.

Caring for the outside is important, but so is caring for the inside. When coming back to your computer after a while, I recommend using a tool like BCUninstaller to go through unused programs and uninstall them. It partially (or fully, if you choose Quiet Uninstall) automates the process and helps you clear residual files and registry entries, which helps speed things up quite a bit.

I'd also recommend clearing out old files and folders, because there's nothing like a break away to see which files you don't really need. If you have files you need but don't need access to all the time, I highly recommend putting those files in a .zip folder, so they're taking up less space visually and physically, but you're not losing anything important. That's what I do with voicebanks in particular, they take up a lot of space and if I have them archived, they take up less but are still there the second I need them.

Finally, clean out your caches. Use the Disk Clean-Up utility to clean out old Windows temp files an Recycle Bin files, then follow this tutorial from The Geek Page to clean out your temp files.

After all this, you should have a clean, fresh laptop! Perfect for getting right back to work.

This post was last edited 3 hours, 20 minutes ago.