Bad habits are often easy to learn but much tougher to shake off, so it is with this in mind that the Durable Computer Cleaning Month gets under way.

How often do you sit at your computer at home, perhaps first thing in the morning, or when you get home after a day at work and as the PC boots up you prepare a little snack, maybe breakfast, maybe a bit of tea and then happily munch away while you browse your Facebook pages and check your emails?

Now if you just stop for a moment, lean over your keyboard and take a bird’s eye view peek between the keys, what do you see? Dust, a few splashes of milk and cereal, a piece of tuna from last week’s (or last month’s!) excellent sandwich and who knows what else? I know! It can be a pretty horrific and stomach churning sight!

Eating whilst at your computer could certainly be considered a bad habit but it certainly isn’t the worst! How often do you subconsciously touch your face, scratch your nose, touch your ears, and play with your hair? Now, have another look between those keys. How much of that dust and detritus might be bits of dry, flaky skin or worse?

Fact: There can be more than 3000 germs per square inch on your keyboard and some researchers claim there could be more bacteria found here than on a toilet seat!

How about your office computer? Is it one you share with others? Then perhaps what you see between the keys didn’t belong to you in the first place! Can you be sure the greasy fingerprints on the mouse are yours?

So, you can see how easy it is not just to lose particles of skin and pieces of toast onto and into your computer equipment but how easy it must be for all those nasty germs to thrive in such conditions.

What can you do? Well, vigorous hand washing and personal hygiene should be the obvious first port of call but in a shared office this can never be taken for granted. (Did he/she wash their hands?)

Thankfully, there are a number of cleaning tools that can be used to combat the bugs that may have taken up residence in your computers. From specialist monitor screen cleaning equipment to full PC and Office Workstation cleaning kits, there really is no excuse not to be protected from the bugs that love to forage beneath your fingertips!