If you wear glasses, you might have a bottle of spray lens cleaner on hand that you’d be tempted to try, but if you spray it on your computer screen, you’re more likely to cause permanent damage than to clean it.
There’s some logic to using lens cleaner on a monitor, but while it seems reasonable on paper, it’s actually one of the worst things you can do to your screen. Remember that a screen is not a window, and it is not made of the same material as your glasses, so chemicals formulated to clean windows will do more harm than good. Instead, if you need to clean your PC screen, it’s best to use a microfiber cloth dampened with water and, if necessary, isopropyl alcohol.
Lens cleaner is too abrasive for PC monitors.
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Cleaning a glass surface like your eyeglass lenses is very different from cleaning your PC’s liquid crystal display (LCD). Lens glass is a solid surface, while LCD screens are made up of a multitude of tiny pixels. Treating the latter like the former with lens cleaner is problematic.
Lens cleaning solutions usually contain harsh chemicals, which help loosen built-up gunk so you can wipe it away. This is fine for lenses because they provide a solid surface, but on an LCD monitor, these chemicals can strip the screen’s outer coatings and ruin its anti-glare capabilities. Worse yet, if you spray lens cleaner directly onto a monitor, it can seep under the screen frame and into delicate internal circuitry. This type of unfortunate incident can cause permanent damage and black dead zones on the corners of your screen.
The best way to keep your computer screen clean is to use a soft microfiber cloth and apply light pressure to wipe away dust and other contaminants. If you need more cleaning power, use a mixture of 50% water and 50% isopropyl alcohol, but only in small amounts and applied only to the cloth, never directly to the screen itself. And don’t forget to get the right kind of microfiber cloth for OLED displays if you use one.
