My 4 yr old got hold of a marker, and put a 1/2 inch mark on my screen.
Any help would be greatly appreciated (it’s a work computer).
:smack:
Try isopropyl alcohol (aka rubbing alcohol; available at a drug store).
Use a soft cloth such as an old T-shirt. Paper product such as a paper towel or Kleenex can scratch the plastic.
Rubbing alcohol removes sharpie ink. However, I am not certain if it’s safe for a laptop screen, but I think those wipes you buy to clean computer screens do contain alcohol.
Rubbing alcohol will remove the coating from the screen, but it won’t cloud it like an ammonia cleaner.
That is a tricky one. No matter what you put on it, the solvent isn’t smart enough to know that you don’t want the Sharpie on the screen but you want everything else to stay just like it is. Be incredibly careful or you will end up with a very dull spot so start as small as humanly possible.
There is one thing that will take off Sharpie marks like no other I have ever seen even on shiny surfaces. It is that citrus orange hand cleaner they sell at home improvement stores. You just dad the tiniest possible amount on and then wipe in with a very soft cloth. It will restore dry erase boards that someone has taken a permanent marker to and make them like new when nothing else can but I have never tried it on an LCD screen so buyer beware.
Sharpie isn’t as permanent as all that. Before you get crazy with the organic solvents, have you tried simply licking your finger and rubbing the mark? Saliva seems to do a bang-up job of removing Sharpie from a lot of the stuff my daughter has marked up in her nine years. Your skin shouldn’t scratch the plastic either. I’ll note, further, that Sharpie doesn’t last for shit when I’ve used it to mark plastic items that had to be handled any amount at all.
Isopropyl would be my first thought - it is very likely that that is what the screen was cleaned with when it was made. It is pretty much the first line cleaner used in most electronics since the demise of the chlorinated flurocarbons. And indeed, the citrus based cleaners, also including the goo removers work very well. They depend upon the turpenes extracted from citrus peel, and in pure state are also a useful electronics production cleaner. (Again due to the demise of CFC 113.) Because of the ubiquity of these cleaners in the electronics industry it would be very unusual the choose a material that was attacked by them. (Polystyrene capacitors were one such casualty.)
Have you tried white out?
Isopropyl alcohol is good for cleaning screens. Rubbing alcohol not so much - it contains other impurities that may be harmful. Rubbing alcohol is not the same thing as isopropyl alcohol.
Many manufacturers recommend iso alcohol for cleaning their LCD screens. Some of them now advise against alcohol products, but I believe that’s mainly because of people using rubbing alcohol and other junk instead (bourbon?).
Those little alcohol swabs they use in hospitals are handy for spot cleaning, and are far cheaper than cleaning products marketed for laptops. You’ll want something bigger for cleaning the whole screen though.
If the alcohol does not work, you could use Super Clean by Castrol, available at hardware and auto stores. This is a great product to have around the house. I use it to clean printer ink off my hands and everything so you know it’s good. Alcohol does not cut it like this stuff does.
Try baby wipes.
Baby wipes will leave an indelible film. I found this out when I used them to clean my glasses, to my chagrin.
I seriously doubt that this would work but if you write on a dry erase board with a Sharpie you can then write over the top of it with a regular dry erase marker and it all erases very easily with an eraser. If your monitor is made from dry erase board material I’d give it a shot.
Good luck. I have a nice ballpoint pen scribble on my monitor that I have not been able to remove.
The ink in a dry-erase marker (for white boards) will get Sharpie ink off of white boards.
However, I do not know how whether or not it will harm the screen.
There are “erasers” you can buy to rub marks off of walls etc, I think they would work, and they don’t use liquid. the only problem I could see is it might scratch.
Computer screen wipes should take it off. Many of them have isopropyl alcohol in them.
Good old Aussie oils Eucalyptus and Tea Tree seem to get marks off anything.
Really? It seems like whenever I see “rubbing alcohol” in the store it says isopropyl alcohol underneath in parenthesis. But I am usually buying alcohol for work from medical suppliers and always refer to it as isopropyl. (I always use this to clean ink off things.) I just used “rubbing” because I thought that term was more familiar and I’d just had a big glass of wine and didn’t want to type isopropyl.
You have made my day.
Sometimes rubbing alcohol has other additives in it – bitterants to discourage the desperately stupid alcoholics, and sometimes colors or scents. Those sorts of things might leave a streaky residue behind. Still I keep a bottle of drug-store rubbing alcohol at home mostly for cleaning electronics.
I just looked up the manufacturer recommendations for my laptop. They specify 50% isopropyl alcohol and a lint-free cloth. Oddly, they also bless my usual in-lab cleaning method of 70% EtOH and kimwipes.