All sound advice and thanks to all for your comments. Come to think of it, I should have mentioned that I only routinely use air on the laptop's keyboard, a flimsy model that vaguely tries to impersonate the real thing, with enough space between the key caps to let stuff like bread crumbs, hairs, not to mention ambient dust.. etc. fall between the keys, which in time is likely to form a nice sticky paste on their underside and end up making some of the keys difficult to operate.
So, I'm thinking that for this kind of job, provided the ambient air is not too humid and I give the compressor a few trial burst away from the keyboard to hopefully get rid of most of the moisture and possible oil residues, something like a portable car tire inflator combined with a vac might work for me. I have changed that laptop's keyboard 4-5 times already, and since replacements only cost about $20.00 + S&H.. a cost-effective solution is to swap in a new keyboard when the current one stops working to my satisfaction, but at this point I'm concerned the connector might be reaching the end of its useful life, and that means the next step would be replacing the motherboard. As to cleaning the inside of the laptop, that's something I only do when I have some other reason the open the case, such as when I felt it was time to change the CPU's thermal pad. Since I rarely have to do anything that makes it necessary to open the case, even if I feel it's a ripoff, I don't mind spending a few dollars on a can of air all that much. Thank you for your comments. CJ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100216052419.gf3...@turki.gavron.org
