Computer cables- if you’re even slightly like us, you’d probably like to see less of them. They get in the way, look untidy, and (if you have more than a few of them) they have an unpleasant tendency to get jumbled up into a spaghetti-like rat’s nest. Unfortunately, until someone comes along with the perfect solution to replacing them all, we’re going to have to live with them. Read on for everything you need to know about the little blighters!

Paying for Cables

Signal and Data Cables

Okay- we have to break it to you. Regardless of what the salesman in your local High Street or out-of-town electronics mega-chainstore says, you should not have to pay £10-15 for a USB cable, or a 1m network cable. Not even if it comes in an impossible-to-open welded plastic box with a “major” manufacturer’s name plastered all over it and blurb extolling the virtues of its gold-plated connectors.

The bottom line is that many of these “features” are an excuse to inflate the price of already grossly marked-up cables.

Now, this should not be taken to mean that the very dirt-cheapest cables are just as good as the most expensive ones.

With cables carrying digital signals, they normally have to meet a minimum standard to reliably transmit the digital signal. Essentially, it has to be good enough for the receiver to be able to tell the digital 1s and 0s apart consistently and with minimal or no errors. If the cable is really bad, the data might get corrupted, forcing the data to be re-sent- if that’s possible- which might slow down transmission rates. Or if that’s not possible, you might receive corrupted, glitchy or missing data. Or it might just not work, full stop!

And of course, cheap and nasty cables may have ropey connections that cause intermittent faults that come and go when they’re jiggled. This is not fun.

However, so long as a cable is reasonably made and comfortably meets the requirements of what it’s supposed to do in the first place- that’s fine. Replacing a working USB 2.0 cable (for example) with a more expensive gold-plated one is unlikely to improve your data transmission rates, especially as- gold-plating aside- it’s unlikely to be significantly better.

With cables carrying analogue signals- such as VGA/SVGA cables, the line is less clear-cut. If you send an SVGA signal through a cable that is only meant to carry the lower-bandwidth 640×480 VGA signals, you might see artifacts or ghosting. On the other hand, it’d be pointless to spend silly money on standard audio cable for connecting your iPod to some £15 portable speakers.

Power Cables

The advice above applies to signal cables (e.g. USB cables, HDMI cables, printer cables). When it comes to power cables, you have to be more careful and make sure that you’re using a cable that’s designed to carry the load you’re shoving through it. We know someone who had a heated fabric press (i.e. very high current) who connected a random “kettle”-style power lead- likely originally supplied with some cheap low-power electronics- onto it. Not to put too fine a point on it, after a while there was a smell of melting plastic and on inspection the cable was getting very hot- at which point the power was hastily turned off and a more heavy duty cable sought out.

While there’s undoubtedly a lot of gimmickry in some power extensions (designed to get you to part with your cash, of course) we would still recommend that you avoid cutting corners. And always use the correct plug fuse for the equipment you’re using-fuses do you a favour by cutting the circuit when something goes wrong and the equipment draws more current than it should be.

The moral is that while it’s a bad idea to go for the very cheapest cables on sale, you shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that you have to pay silly money for a decent USB printer cable either.

(Obligatory plug; see our complete range of decent cables at very reasonable prices)