New System...

[Mr. C]

I just stick a pair of tweezers in the ground of the electrical socket and touch it before grabbing any components.
As I understand it, a lot of failures due to static discharge happen over time, rather than 1 huge zap:?:

[zeradul]

I had a friend who was connecting a CAT5 cable to his Linksys router, and one static shock from his finger to the metal edge of the plug socket and ever since that port on the Router hasn't worked. He is lucky the one that went bad was not a cruicial one, but just one of the 'hub' connections.

[sKuLLsHoT]

static definitely kills, i killed a 21" sony monitor by grabbing the monitor data lead, static shock from my hand to some of the pins on that connector and after that the monitor was dead, the whole thing, dead!

RMA'd it no worries, but ever since then i always use them little plastic condoms on data connectors mainly on expensive things (like my own monitor and game theatre)

I'll have to read an A+ book, coz 2 guys i know that have done it, are also paranoid about static, it must say some mega evil stuff about static in there, but yeah, u r right Mr C, most static-caused failures don't happen straight away

PC store i used to work in started using anti-static gear at all times, and since then their failure rate on ram has halved and cpu's its non-existent (cept fools like me who try to kill the things :devil: )

[Beefy]

only thing i've killed with static was a NIC in a PC I was moving to a different room.. left the network cable plugged in, which dragged on the carpet and fried the card.. :)