New
#1
Optical Drive Cleaning
Thinking about the fact that I had not cleaned my optical drives in a very long time, I used one of those disks with a couple of brushes attached, to clean my DVD drives. I can't be certain, but I think that it improved the read speed while encoding some video by 3-5 fps, and perhaps stabilized the speed somewhat.
That is as much as I have ever done, but being a smoker, and knowing the sticky nature of nicotine smoke, I would bet that the brushing didn't remove that. I read a couple of web pages, where it recommended using canned air to blast in the tray slot, but I tend to feel that might just blow the dust around, and still not remove the nicotine. Another metioned using a Q-Tip moistened with isopropyl alcohol, directly on the lens of laptop drives, because the lens is attached to the tray, thus exposed when the tray is open, but that is not true of an internal desktop drive.
Therefore, I'm wondering how advisable it would be to use that alcohol to moisten the little brushes on the cleaner disk for that purpose? Obviously, it couldn't be much, otherwise it would be slung around inside the drive, and likely would dry very quickly. I'm not sure if it would really make the lens cleaner, or just smear the nicotine around.
I'm hoping that someone that smokes and has tried something like this will respond, rather than others with no real experience.