Avoiding Damage: Your Guide to Safely Handling PC Components

how's it going guys welcome to another video today we're going to be talking about computer components and how to properly hold and handle them especially for those who are doing first-time builds this can be kind of a scary subject so by the end of this video you should have more confidence in all your builds that you do so we're going to start out component by component so right now we're looking at the motherboard so this will be typically the first part you start to unbox because you need to get your motherboard out of its box to install your cpu your ram and sometimes you can do the cooler as well before it even goes into the case another thing to make sure of is don't build on any kind of carpet or cloth material where your feet stand because as you move around and as you shuffle this can actually build up electrostatic charge you ideally want to work on either a wood or tile floor even a very small electric charge can still damage some of your components so you have to be very careful in this way now typically in a more moist climate this won't happen as often but especially in wintertime if it is dryer out it is a lot easier for your body to build up this charge luckily there are a lot of ways to get rid of this charge simply touch something big that is metal and that will ground you because all electrostatic charge will actually leave your body and go to that an easy place for this is actually your computer case itself since most cases these days are decently big and made of some kind of metal you can just put your hand on the case or touch it every now and then and all the charge will be gone now i'm sure you've seen something that looks a little bit like this so this is an anti-static strap this is just basically a wire so this part will go on your wrist and you'll see right there it's just a piece of metal on the back there that'll connect to your skin and then the other part the clip focus there we go the metal clip you can just clip to the side of your case and that should work fine all right so for motherboards you ideally want to always try to hold it on the edges of the board the main thing you're going to be worrying about here is touching any of the little capacitors that are on top because those are the most fragile part in my opinion obviously the socket itself is very delicate if you don't want to get any dirt or grime inside those socket holes and some of the heat sinks that are on there also can be very delicate but the easiest way to avoid all of this is just to hold the board by its edges now this isn't always possible because when you're installing the board you're going to have to place it in there somehow so what i recommend doing is having one hand on the bottom where the edges and the other hand you can actually place your hand where the metal bracket to the back of the cpu plate is the easier spots to touch the board are actually all the plastic spots if you are worried about esd obviously plastic will not conduct this electricity like the metal will all right next we are going to be talking about the cpu so the biggest deal with cpus is to not touch any of the pins these pins are very small and very fragile and even if you bend one slightly if it does not line up with that hole and you end up crushing it when you're inserting the cpu that can be almost impossible to fix technically it can be but it is extremely hard just due to the size of these pins and most people don't have the correct tools if you do need to restrain one of them but you really want to make sure you are only holding this by the edges and even when you install it all you have to do is place it in the socket you do not need to press it or put any kind of pressure so all you should ever be doing is touching the edges and dropping it in slightly ram is pretty simple along with video cards i'm going to do both is the same time because really the only thing you have to worry about with these is the pins themselves the actual sides of most of these cards are covered with some kind of heat sink or plastic shroud anyways so they're very easy to handle and hold without having any worry of actually damaging them the only thing you really need to worry about is not scratching or messing up anything with the golden plated pins these are the pins where the actual data gets sent and received through that connects to your motherboard so you want to make sure that connection is solid now any other little card like a sound card perhaps is pretty easy because you can typically just hold it by the bracket that's used to install it now obviously when you need to install it and press down you can do that by the same method of the motherboard just using the edges and pretty much just press it in nice and smoothly these do also have capacitors on them usually so just be careful not to touch any of the components on the board itself okay hard drives these days are actually quite easy to hold because most people now are using ssds where ssds don't have any actual moving parts inside them and the majority of the ssd is usually covered anyway so it's very hard to actually mess this up older hard drives do have moving parts in them the actual standard disc that's inside them that spins so you want to make sure to handle these with a little more care just make sure not to shake or rattle them and you should be fine and again just like the other components always watch the pins so even on ssds just be mindful of where the data and power for the sata ports connect in and other than that you should be totally fine with those all right guys and that is it for this video i hope that by the end of this you have a little more confidence in building your computer and exactly how to hold and manage your items if you like this please leave a like comment below let me know what you liked about it let me know what you didn't like about it if you have any other questions as well always leave them down there and i will chat with you there otherwise i'll say subscribe for more like this and i'll see you on the next [Music] one [Music]

Channel: Max's Tech

Views: 15,237

Keywords: Max, Tips, laptop, computer, tech, how, to, software, hardware, easy, max's, tutorial, fast, simple, internet, pc, mac, windows, amd, intel, explained, handle, hold, esd, shock, parts, hardware, components, build, new

Id: TG-1pxSGXU8

Length: 5min 20sec (320 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021