The Twins get Connected

16:51.11 - Wednesday 16th February 2005   (Link to This Entry)

I spent this morning and a good part of the afternoon galavanting all over the area talking to people, and decided to hook the twins (my two matching TFTs) up to the new UPS on my return.

Because they're TFT, and specifically because they're Dells, they don't have the standard monitor power connectors. Instead they use the standard-ish Dell PSUs that accept both UK and US voltages - yay for Dell on that one. Naturally I don't want to hack these cables up just to stick C14 plugs on them.

Instead, realising that I have two monitors and possibly a router and cable modem to add and that putting equipment through the UPS would free up sockets, I decided to remove the cable from a cheap 4-way and butcher an old C13-C14 (loopback?) cable instead, which would then allow me to connect up to four standard UK mains plugs as long as I took care not to overload the single socket that they would be connected to.

I must be losing my touch - it wasn't even a bodge job. The end result is a 4-way that plugs directly into the UPS, all nice and neat as you please. There are still an awful lot of empty sockets on the thing, but they can be used another time.