You honestly have nothing to worry about.. There's no harm in using an antistatic wristband or mat, but there's not really any point imo.

Awesome, thanks man!

doot wrote You honestly have nothing to worry about.. There's no harm in using an antistatic wristband or mat, but there's not really any point imo.

There is a point in wearing them.

In a class of mine at school a kid simply meant to point at a drive and shocked it and lost all of its data.

But back to the the OP.

If you are touching the metal of the case while the computer is plugged in but not on you'll be okay.

But its good to be able to use two hands so that when a strap would come in.

Also if you plan to work professionally on a computer mist places requires a ESD band.

HTTK wrote

doot wrote You honestly have nothing to worry about.. There's no harm in using an anti-static wristband or mat, but there's not really any point imo.

There is a point in wearing them.

In a class of mine at school a kid simply meant to point at a drive and shocked it and lost all of its data.

But back to the the OP.

If you are touching the metal of the case while the computer is plugged in but not on you'll be okay.

But its good to be able to use two hands so that when a strap would come in.

Also if you plan to work professionally on a computer mist places requires a ESD band.

That kid must have had a defibrillator hooked up to him while he was handling the drive.

For putting together a regular, consumer PC, then I wouldn't go out of your way to use ESD protective equipment. If you are working for google at one of their data centers, then obviously this protective gear would be mandatory. There are many members on here who have never used these on the many computers they have built, and have have zero problems. At the end of the day OP, if you want to be as safe as possible, then go for it, but if you don't, then the chance of anything bad happening is second to none as long as you don't run around in circles on a carpet with socks on beforehand.

I recently splashed a lot of dough on a CPU/Board?RAM, this entitled a system re-build, I didn't wear an anti-static wrist strap because well... I don't have one, never used one and never had any issues. I once rebuilt my PC many years ago at about 2AM on a carpet floor.. the worst case scenario and nothing happened.
If you want to be sure, just touch the metal of the case before you handle a component and you'll be fine.

HTTK wrote

doot wrote You honestly have nothing to worry about.. There's no harm in using an antistatic wristband or mat, but there's not really any point imo.

There is a point in wearing them.

In a class of mine at school a kid simply meant to point at a drive and shocked it and lost all of its data.

But back to the the OP.

If you are touching the metal of the case while the computer is plugged in but not on you'll be okay.

But its good to be able to use two hands so that when a strap would come in.

Also if you plan to work professionally on a computer mist places requires a ESD band.

Just going to bring up the unlikeliness of getting ESD. I've worked with PC's in my work for just over a year. We do require using ESD bands, do we use them? No. Has anything fried? No. Same with my home PC.