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I just found (slashdot) this rather interesting substance that has been concocted by computer history enthusiasts which can reverse the brawning of case plastic. Turns out the culprit was the flame retardant included in the plastic and when some interested chemical engineers got involved they were able to figure out what was causing it and refine the way that others had stumbled over. The result is a paste/cream that they have released openly, including instructions on how to make it online. Retr0Bright home Could be useful for anyone with their own historic computer collection or in fact several schools that I know of that use their historic and browned computers daily http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/file/view/after_eight_hours.jpg

So I'm thinking about donning the marigolds and performing some preventative maintenance on devices. Do you have a cleaning regime in place for keyboards/PCs/projectors? If so, how often do you clean them? Any tips or recommended products?

Hi all, If any of you out there are still using tape drives (we are, but in conjuction with online and NAS backup storage too) how often do you use a cleaning tape on them? Currently our LTO drive gets the cleaning tape every Monday morning and the drive does 5 backups a week plus a Saturday monthly. Do I need to be cleaning it every week? I only ask as I've got to order a new cleaning tape and I don't want to order / use more than I really have to.

Who cleans your screens/monitors? We have about 300 computers around the school. Last time I cleaned any, I did 70 and that took me 2 hours (glass screens, so it took a bit of effort on each). They get dirty relatively quickly, and our health and safety auditor mentioned that they needed cleaning more often. So, I don't really have a day to spare every week to go round scrubbing screens... What do you do?

A couple of questions on computer cleaning... Are there any guidelines/legal/health and safety requirements on how often we should be cleaning computer keyboards/mice? How often are you cleaning yours? thanks

We have 18 Sanyo XE40s on Promethean Activboards and several are very dim and showing colour shading and patterning. We sent one back under warranty for the severe colouring (I thought the LCD panel had gone) and were told it needed cleaning; £90 plus carriage. We have a very thorough filter cleaning regime here every two weeks where the outsides of the projectors are dusted down with a hand-held vacuum then the filters are removed with the vacuum on to catch any stray dust that may drop in off the filter. Ours is a relatively new school with clean ceilings and tight pile carpets, ie there is very little dust around unlike in our old school. We offered this data to Promethean but they were not interested. We declined the clean and the projector was returned to us in the same state, effectively unusable. We bought a service manual and studied it then proceeded to strip this projector down. The dust was unbelievable inside! We stripped down the light path and cleaned everything and reassembled it. PAT tested it and it was as good as new. We are now on the 16th projector (we are doing them all regardless of condition as they are all 2.5 years old) and they've all had a new lease of life. It took us three hours to do the first one (extra extra careful!) and now our technician has it down to 75 mins start to finish. It is not a difficult job to do; you just need to be methodical, careful and patient. Materials needed are as follows: Antistatic mat/wristband/clip etc Usual screwdrivers/Allen keys/tweezers Half a can of air duster (we get two projectors done per can) Lint-free lens cloths Glass cleaner Test pattern generator (optional - could use some software pattern generator instead) PAT tester Quiet place to work undisturbed Confidence to handle the components safely without dropping them! If there's any interest out there I'd be happy to put together a sequence of events (disassembly/cleaning process/reassembly) for other members with the usual disclaimers, ie this is how we do it and it works for us, but if you break your projector following what we've done then it's down to you Let me know.