Hey I'm having a bit of trouble moving into a new case. Long story short I was given an old computer and I gutted it and decided to use the case, but it's Dell and most of casing is custom-fitted for the parts, I've already had to do some modifications.

The biggest problem I have now is that the power button is very strange... In the old computer there's a ribbon and power cable connecting to a small board that adds 2 USB slots and a headphone jack to the front of the computer. Then THAT is connected to another small ribbon cable that connects to another board that works with the power switch. Well the old MOBO has a ribbon cable slot that's not the usual size, it's much smaller, and my MOBO doesn't have that small slot. I do however have an extra cable slot for a normal size cable.

I was wondering if there's any sort of splitter to make smaller ribbon cable sizes, or any suggestions at all on what I should do would be greatly appreciated. I did save the front of my old case, so if worse comes to worse i could always try and take the power button from that and try to work it into the case or just tape it.

Thanks in advanced =D

If me, I would just buy a new, standard ATX Form Factor case so you can avoid this PITA proprietary Dell stuff. There should not be any "power" cables running to small boards anywhere, unless these cables are coming directly from the power supply, and in that situation, I would suspect it is a very old computer, possibly an AT format (which would be prior to 1996), and very proprietary - which if very bad for consumers who want to work on them.

But AT is indeed very old. So I suspect these are data cables to provide front panel access to these features. Note that even the front panel power switch on ATX systems does not really have "power" per say. It merely shorts two pins on the motherboard which signals the power supply to power up. On the old AT style, a long power cable with attached power button was hardwired into the AT power supply and ran directly to the front of the case. Is yours like that?

There is no way of knowing if there are any type of splitter cables without knowing the exact purpose of the cables. And we don't know that. If you can provide some motherboard model numbers, it might help. On a typical motherboard that uses IDE drives, the drive cables would be the largest flat ribbon cables. A slightly smaller ribbon cable would be for the floppy drive. If these other flat ribbon cables are smaller, with fewer wires, they are probably for USB, Firewire, or some other I/O.

Yeah, ideally I would love a brand new case, but I don't have a job and the dell is a step up from my old case. You are right, the power cables don't run to any of the small boards, just the ribbon cable connecting to the motherboard. My computer has an ATX motherboard, and I'm pretty sure the Dell was past 1996 as well, but it's just weird the way Dell has their pre-made computers set up. I mean you should see some of the stuff they implement...

On my rig (before I moved into the new case) my power button was connected directly to the motherboard, and my motherboard to the power supply, so not directly attached power supply. I still have the power button from my old case so if I really had to I could just tape the power button to the new case and hook it to my motherboard, but I wanted to see if I could get the 2 USB ports as well.

The ribbon cable is not nearly as big as a hard drive, floppy, or CD/DVD drive, it's just meant to hook up to the USB board. Also after a bit more research I failed to find any sort of splitter or other method. So at this point I'm thinking of just dropping the built in power button on the new case and salvaging the old one.