calling all blind PC builders

Here, we can talk about the joys of building PCs blind. Currently I'm going through my small form factor phase, and I am personally telling you all that it's a massive rabbit hole that you will never get out of! You can also talk about software for controling motherboards, GPU fans and lighting, and other software that is used to control the computer's hardware on this thread.

Nice one. I have a custom build PC my brother made, I was able to feel and put in Ram sticks and such, but when it comes to everything else I'm kinda lost. Would love to change that though. So for my questions, let's say you have that big case, how do you even organise everything in there, do you just stack stuff on top of each other? How do you do cable management, etc.

Every time I've seen the inside of a laptop I've seen no way to alter the RAM, hard drive and such.

It depends on the Laptop, for example Laptops like the Framework devices allow to modify a lot of components, but I think the main intend for this topic are towers.

My PC is some sort of custom tower, I didn’t build it, I bought it off Amazon a couple of years ago.

The only experience I had with putting anything in a tower was when I maximized the memory in one I was given. Boy did it help matters. I got one of the RAM sticks in wrong but it did no damage and I put it in the other way.

I remember my GF at the time asking me who was gonna put the RAM in and I told her I'd do it. She didn't believe me but I did it. She was amazed but really there was nothing to it. As far as putting in other hardware with cables and such I suppose it wouldn't be very hard to do, just some looking around at the places and coming up with a strategy to run any cables involved, so just some planning beforehand would seem to do the trick.

Come to think of it I also put a Sound Blaster sound card in that tower.

I have little experience in this topic, but I have built one computer with small help. The only thing that we, as blind people, probably cannot do fully, especially on older motherboards, is correctly connecting the front panel.

@2 and @4: Things connect to certain spots on the motherboard, and cables are managed with zip ties and tie-down points. Yes, I should have specified that this is for desktop computers.

@7 it's definitely a guessing game for sure. Luckily, the pins are mostly in the same spot, so it's just a game of plugging and chugging until you get power with either the power or reset button. I don't even bother with the LEDs.
I had to mutilate a front power header to get it to work with a motherboard. The case in question was a Shiny Snake S300 which had power and LED in a row, and my Gigabyte B650I Aorus ultra stupidly just had power by itself. I resorted to pulling all the pins out of the connector then testing to make sure they still worked just by plugging in the delicate connectors straight into the pins. Once I proved it to work, I semi-stuck them back into the undamaged part of the header and lopped the rest off with some side cutters. It looks absolutely terrible, but whatever; so does the rest of the inside since it's SFF.

Yes, but I told about things like Leds on front. Legend has it that on some older motherboards, by wrong connecting the front panel you can even burn the motherboard ;), but I think it isn't true.

-- (aldenmaster):
@7 it's definitely a guessing game for sure. Luckily, the pins are mostly in the same spot, so it's just a game of plugging and chugging until you get power with either the power or reset button. I don't even bother with the LEDs.
I had to mutilate a front power header to get it to work with a motherboard. The case in question was a Shiny Snake S300 which had power and LED in a row, and my Gigabyte B650I Aorus ultra stupidly just had power by itself. I resorted to pulling all the pins out of the connector then testing to make sure they still worked just by plugging in the delicate connectors straight into the pins. Once I proved it to work, I semi-stuck them back into the undamaged part of the header and lopped the rest off with some side cutters. It looks absolutely terrible, but whatever; so does the rest of the inside since it's SFF.

--

@10 I think it makes sense. There probably wasn't an overcurrent protection on the LED header, and connecting the power button and shorting a board with little voltage regulation definitely could do some damage. As I've found out, this is no longer the case, and I don't think it has been since the mid 2000s. Maybe back in the 90s though when we were finally switching away from hard power switches.