Spurred by the death of my desktop system a few days ago, I spent most of yesterday cleaning up and rearranging the office, especially my desk.

I hadn’t intended to spend much time on it. My initial plan was just to remove the carcass of the desktop system and store it somewhere out of the way until I decided to put together another one. But after pulling it out and seeing the layers of archaeological techno-strata of wires behind it, I knew it needed more drastic action.

As we used to say when playing Shadowrun: when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. 🙂 Some pondering and a trip to a nearby hardware store provided me with the supplies to implement a neat solution I originally saw on Lifehacker: mounting a good portion of my electronic devices on a pegboard under my desk, along with their wires. I also took the opportunity to label the power adapters that had somehow escaped before (I highly recommend labeling adapters with the name and model of the device they’re for, especially when you have a number of them and may not look at them again for several years).

So at the end of the first stage, I’ve got my cable modem, my wireless router, and a network switch all mounted on a vertical pegboard, out of the way under a corner of my desk, along with a power strip to feed them. I can easily see them if I need to as well. 🙂

Stage two involves mounting a second piece of pegboard horizontally below the desk itself, so I can mount certain other electronics onto it (such as my external DVD drive). That’s going to require a little more work though, and maybe a second hardware-store trip. Wish me luck!

LATER EDIT: Success! My external DVD drive, network-attached storage device, and electric pencil sharpener are now mounted to the underside of my desk. 😀