Over the years I have seen many ideas on the web to help reduce cable chaos and made many of my own attempts to reduce or eliminate. My best attempts have created neat, tidy and largely hidden the cables, but very soon after, if not minutes later I always had add or remove a device or to take wall wart on a trip, or just rearrange, and the immediate wiring chaos that occurs is not desirable at all. Often my attempts were never even completed, as frustration at the bad results, lead to abandoning the attempt.
It also seems that all attempts are for fixed wiring that does not allow you to move the computer to easily get to the rear to make changes. I also am trying to overcome issue of heavy cables pulling on plugs & especially cards in motherboard slots.
First attempt was to add some swivel wheels to a flat board and use cheap power cord wrappers with some added bracing, which also keeps the computer on the trolley.
The result was a definite improvement as the trolley for in/out easy access was great and the power cord holders provide fairly good cable management.
However there were a lot of lessons learnt:
- plan which cables go into which bundle, for example cables that are entirely local to computer and cables that go from the computer to different destinations.
- bundling can actually increase cable weight/pull on computer plugs – take care to include slack and support BOTH ends.
- try hard not to twist cables around each or it becomes very difficult to remove cables.
- use of cheap plastic bags ties are good, but not as quick to undo and reuse, and not much good for thicker cables/bundles.
- power cord holders used where OK, but a bit flimsy for larger cable bundles and did not leave enough space to fit my large hands in.
- had to undo angled brace on one side to open computer case!
- next time buy a case with wheels.
The biggest issues were not enough room for easy access to change, too many cables bundled together and worst was wrong cables in wrong bundles severely restricted ability to move the trolley in/out for easy access.
However all this did lead to good ideas for improvement, which the next post on this topic will show were really successful.