 Linus and I are fairly well known for consistently complaining about brushed aluminum finishes, because products that have them are really frustrating to handle. An example of this is my fairly recent Bitfenix Prodigy video, where yet again, I can barely touch the product with my hands, making it pretty tricky to actually do a case review. Well, a member of our community on that video has pointed out that it's no big deal. MFK51 said that you can just clean oil-etched fingerprints off with some Windex. Speaking of oil, Linus and I will be making an Oil Cool PC build guide soon, so make sure you stay subscribed to that so you won't miss it. But for now... It's science time. Corsair Gaming RGB keyboards feature precision Cherry MX RGB keyswitches for 16.8 million color-per-key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization. Click now to learn more. Our first specimen is one of our G750JZ gaming laptops. They aren't super old, so there hasn't been a ton of time for hand oils to etch very deep into the brushed aluminum, but it's still quite covered and quite gross overall, so we're going to see how well the Windex method works. Another idea that we will be testing on this laptop is different types of strokes, which might work best for different folks. You normally want to clean with the grain, so go with the brush strokes and the aluminum, but in areas that this would be difficult, we're going to test a circular motion to see if it actually really matters. So just to start off, I'm going to spray our cloth with a fairly large amount of Windex because we have a lot of surface to cover, and then just kind of go to town. So for the major parts, I'm going to be going with the grain, so just down the laptop essentially because the grain is just straight down the laptop. Now this top part, I can mostly get it by going with the grain, but not entirely, so there's still definitely areas there that didn't get very well taken care of, and when you're doing this, you want to go all the way down and over the edge so that you don't leave gunk at the end, so you don't leave any marks there. So it's kind of hard here because you can see I can't get all the way up in there, so we're going to try the circular pattern up here by kind of shoving my finger into the cloth, and using it as more of a direct applicator, and then just trying to get up in there. Next we have an old Silverstone TJ-10 that has been around the office for quite a while now. This was a production computer for quite some time, so it has definitely seen its fair share of abuse in the oily hands department, especially on the front panel. We'll be cleaning the tower's front panel on one side with Windex, and on the other side with 99% isopropyl alcohol, just to see if there is any differences between these two products when it comes to cleaning brushed aluminium. One thing that should be noted is that after quite a bit of use, this tower was already wiped down all over with isopropyl alcohol by Linus before it was stored in the garage for a few months, so the marks on it that you see now have already survived one cleaning. So we've sectioned off the front of the case. The left side is for isopropyl alcohol, and the right side is for Windex. You can see in the top right hand corner it's been sectioned off again, that's because this is where people would open the actual case, so this is the worst problem area, so we didn't want to have Windex just deal with that by itself and alcohol have an easy time. But below this is generally the same as the rest of the case, so we just sectioned off this top part and the left side will again be alcohol, on the right side will be Windex, but then the rest of it will be cleaned by just their respective individual cleaners. So here we have the first cloth which has already been doused with alcohol, and then so I'm going to brush with the grain because we just have a very large surface here, so it should be easy enough to just do that. I'm going to be putting in a little bit of elbow grease but not way too much. We're going to have to let it, I know the alcohol evaporates super quickly, but we're going to have to kind of let it dry a little bit for the Windex, so after I clean the Windex section, you're going to need a sec to get a different cloth. Okay, whoop. After I do the Windex section, we're probably going to have to cut for a little bit, let it dry, and then come back. So it actually looks really good. I did go and talk to Linus after I noticed the alcohol worked really well considering he already cleaned it with alcohol. It shouldn't have had fingerprints on it looking at it now, and when talking to him he may have used paper towel instead of microfiber cloth, and he definitely used less alcohol on the cloth than I did, so that might have something to do with it. Maybe a little bit more alcohol, a bigger and better cloth might help a lot, so just something to take note of as the alcohol did look like it did a really good job, but so did the Windex. I just expected the Windex to beat out the alcohol by a lot in this case because we had already used alcohol and there was fingerprints on it, but they both looked like they did really good both in the harder test in the top right hand corner which had a lot more fingerprint etching, and in the not so bad areas on the far left and bottom right hand kind of sections of the case as well. So the circular motion pattern didn't really work. I think a lot of the reason why it didn't really work is the residue that the Windex leaves behind. If you're able to go in broad strokes, like say with the grain, it should be able to go completely off and pull all the Windex residue with it, not leaving any gross streaks behind, but when you go in that circular pattern, you're inherently leaving things behind, so it does kind of end up being really gross overall. So there you have it folks, but before we leave you today, there are two more things I want to say. First off is that for things that are truly messed up and have a ton of deep etching on them, you will need to repair it by using something aggressive or abrasive so you can wear down the area around it to make it flat, but this is not really recommended at all with brushed aluminum because you will probably destroy the brushed look and make it look kind of trash when you're done, unless you're very very skilled, and there might be some exceptions there, but still just don't. And second is that whatever Mefk 51 thinks, this still doesn't excuse the use of brushed aluminum on products that were actually meant to touch wrist rests, computer cases, monitors, etc. It's still quite hard to work with, and we will still likely be complaining when it is used in stupid places like wrist rests for your keyboard and other things as well, but at least armed with this method and regular maintenance, you'll have a chance to keep it good looking in the long run. All right guys, thanks for watching. Make sure that you stay tuned and stay subscribed for that mineral oil cooled computer that's hopefully coming sometime soon if I can drag Linus into the room to start actually filming that video. Like, dislike the video, like if you like bacon, dislike if you don't like bacon. Comment in the video down below if you have something to say about cleaning aluminum, maybe there's some other methods. I know there are a few other methods, so what methods do you like the most? 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