Remove all power connectors that are installed on different devices inside your computer. In our case our computer had a CD burner, a hard disk drive and a floppy disk drive, so we had to remove the power connector from these three devices, plus the motherboard. Depending on your configuration you will need to remove more cables.

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Figure 5: Removing the power connector from our CD burner.

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Figure 6: Removing the power connector from our floppy disk drive.

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Figure 7: Removing the power connector from our hard disk drive.

As for the motherboard, usually two connectors are used: a main connector with 20 or 24 pins and an auxiliary 4-pin connector, called ATX12V. Some low-end motherboards don’t have this ATX12V connector. You need to look for it carefully as usually it isn’t located near the main power connector – even though on our motherboard they were located side-by-side, this setup isn’t the usual one.

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Figure 8: Motherboard power connectors.

Remove the motherboard power connectors is a two-step procedure, first press the latch located on the middle of the connector and then pull the connector up. In Figure 9 we illustrate the removal of the main motherboard connector and in Figure 10 the removal of the ATX12V auxiliary connector.

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Figure 9: Removing the motherboard main power connector.

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Figure 10: Removing the motherboard ATX12V auxiliary connector.