Spot of Decorating...

Of course, I needed to move the PC out of the room for fear that it started to "drink paint". I rapidly disconnected all the cables and moved the PC and it's peripherals (3 printers, Zip drive, scanner etc) out of the room.

You would not believe the amount of tangled cable that came with it! It took me nearly an hour to just untangle all this mess. It was at this time that a thought occurred to me "What are all these cables for?" and (possibly more important) "Where do they go when I reconnect my PC?"

It's at moments like this that you sit and think, "If only I had....". This is what these weeks' article is about - things you can do to make this kind of job so much simpler.

Label Cables

First thing to do BEFORE you disconnect everything is to get some self adhesive address labels - the kind often used on large brown envelopes.

There are primarily 3 groups of cables that you will come across. These are:

· Power cables

· Main component connections

· Peripherals

Power cables come in 2 basic varieties. The "direct cable" - from mains plug straight into the component. The other type is for smaller units (zip drives, scanners for example) that have some kind of transformer between the mains plug and the component. Fold a label around itself over the cable and label it with which component the plug belongs to.

Main component connections are for those devices that MUST be connected in order for the computer to function. These are...

· Monitor

· Keyboard

· Mouse

Each of these components will connect directly to the main "box". You may have additional units that fall into this category such as an external hard disk.

Label each cable AND make a note of which plug goes where. This is usually quite simple as they often use different shaped plugs to connect to the computer. However, mice and keyboards often share a similar PS/2 type connector. Where you have 2 such similar plugs (often near each other), mark on your label "Left" or "Right", "Top" or "Bottom". The orientation should always be with you facing the back of the computer - face on as it were. Therefore, your mouse label might have "Mouse left".

You might sit there thinking "Why bother labeling the mouse?" It's obvious right? Well yes, but you may be lying on the floor with the wires hanging down where you can't SEE which device it is.

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