Static Protection

[turkster]

Just the other day I picked up an old Pentium II MMX system that college were throwing out. Now for some bureaucratic reason they wouldnt let me take the case. So I had to take it all apart bit by bit and reassemble it here. Its not a bad comp by my standards 64MB Ram, 2x Seagate 2GB HDD, Onboard Intel 10/100 ethernet and two usb ports and ancient ATI PCI GFX. Well its better than my Pentium 100mhz system which was previously my second system

Anyway I put it back together in a expanded polystyrene box with the PSU and hard disk drives outside the box on top. The question is whats the best way to protect this from static electricity. I was thiking something on the lines of coating the interior of the expanded polystyrene box with aluminium foil and laying the HDD and OSU on another layer of aluminium foil on top of the box and then make sure the whole lot was electrically linked to the PSU casing.

Do you think that would work? I dont really have the time to make a proper case for it at the moment specially considering the system is pretty obsolete but at the same time I dont want to wreck it by leaving it like this.

[Shogun]

One word : shorts

[streetster]

i had a p4 system sitting on my desk for about a month, just had the mobo on a static bag, the harddrive/cdrom on top of the psu, and all was good... its now sitting in a shiney black widow case now

[SMPer]

i dont think using aluminium foil is a good idea..wood or cardboard is better..or u could always get a normal, proper case for it

[iranu]

go to ebuyer and pick up a cheap case for £10

[turkster]

Well it aint an atx mobo. Its an old Foxconn mobo with a big riser card with all PCI/ISA slots and IDE floppy connectors so I dont think it will fit in a standard case. I dont really want to shell out for a case for it as buying over the net is not really an option at the mo and postage etc to Ireland is usually expensive.

My only problem really is to provide some kind of Faraday cage/EM shield around the mobo and pci cards. The PSU HDD and optical drives are are protected within their own shells so, I think, all they need is to be grounded to the PSU casing.
Wood or plastic would not be a huge amount of use in this situation. I can see that it would be quite difficult to avoid shorts on the mobo if i was using aluminium foil but if I were to put the foil over the outside of the styrene box and only connected it to the mobo where the I/O shield and pci backplates are maybe it would work?

[Dickie]

why dont you just go and steal the case? (presuming its still there)

[turkster]

You see then my dept would get in trouble for it and there would be an obvious culprit=me