I’ll be straight with it. I’m a smoker, I smoke inside, I have a PC that is also inside. I want to clean my PC thoroughly to buy it a few more years. I know about the q tip method, and the compressed air, and general methods of cleaning out gunk and junk from PC parts. But this boy is way too gunked up for a regular cleaning. So, I reckon, the easiest way to clean it is to dunk the dirtiest parts in a bath of isopropyl alcohol. I was considering acetone at first, but it’s way too strong of a solvent, and alcohol should be better at dissolving organic residues. Is this a good idea?
I hereby submit this query to the council, and await judgement.
You can buy yourself and your electronics a lot of years by cutting the smoking :)
Technically you could submerge parts in isopropyl alcohol. The concern with liquid is primarily corrosion and causing shortages. If there is no stored electricity in the capacitors, the isopropyl alcohol shouldn’t cause any corrosion. It would not be the best way to clean it, in reality, but you could probably do it. I would just spray some on and gently clean it with an old toothbrush.
Smoke, especially cigarette smoke, gets onto everything and is awful to try and clean. I won’t buy used electronics used in a smokers home, or much of anything for that matter.
When I used to do computer repair for work I had a hard limit against working on stuff from a smoker’s household or office. Not only am I too asthmatic to enjoy spending time in such a place, but the thick sticky crud in every nook and cranny of the machine made any hardware job far more trouble than it was worth to me.
I’m still willing to occasionally be the “computer guy” for certain friends and family, but smokers can figure something else out because I’m not touching it. (And yes, weed smoke counts.)