How often do you do it?

[Gregg]

...inspired by Harv's "Apple Story" post:

I have kits to clean my prehistoric floppy drive and my CD drive. I bought them when I was having trouble with a CD quite awhile ago. I do not use them regularly, and probably have not cleaned either drive in well over a year, or two! I also have a stone age internal Zip drive. I don't have anything to clean it with. (No, Harv, I'm not planning to insert the floppy disk cleaner into the Zip drive.) So, it's never been cleaned in the five years I've had the computer - well, four years: I have the orginal Zip drive in a drawer.

So, how often do you do it?

P.S. To those who thought this topic should have had the "OT" prefix, sorry; you were wrong!

[Bernie]

Pull it out of the box and head over to the local Car Wash  LOL    just kidding. The only thing I can think of is pulling it and using good old compressed air. I've often wondered if there's Floppy /Zip disk Cleaning Disks like CD drives have?? I bet Kelly knows    
Or maybe a water cannon from the Fire dept. LOL     Harv  told me to act silly.   See how much you can learn here

[Gregg]

I take it that nobody cleans any drives? Or only one person took the bait on this topic... I don't use my CD ROM drive that often. I can't say whether I use the floppy drive more often than the Zip drive because it's too close to call. They haven't given me any problems, which leads me to believe cleaning them isn't necessary. Are those kits are just another way for someone to make money??

[Paddy]

I think most of us subscribe to the "if it ain't broke..." axiom. Especially when it comes to optical drives - no sense in moving any dust around to make it stop working! I've never had to clean my G3's CD-ROM drive (it's now 6 years old, and the past 3 it has endured a lot more use from my game-playing children than it ever got from me!!) or my G4's drive. I do have a couple of non-working CD-ROM drives that I will pop into an external SCSI case and see if I can't clean 'em up and make them work again. I bought a cleaner disk for that purpose...months ago. One of these days.

[krissel]

Gregg, as to how often one does it, I think this is the only time most people can say, without winking, that they are virgins.

[Gregg]

krissel, I did it once. Since then I haven't needed to. Not sure it made things better when I did. It still goes in and out, and spins around and mounts, so I guess that's all you want from it.

[Bill]

Gregg,you forgot it talks. <g>

[Gregg]

Yeah, Bill... when it's mounted, it talks, dirty. So, why clean it?