Essential hardware for business

[Wayward]

What hardware, apart from your PC, do you find essential to your business?

If you don't have one already, I recommend getting an uninteruptible power supply (I'm sure you have them for servers, but get one for your dev machine too). We're having a thunderstorm here right now that just knocked out the electricity for a few moments. The lights went out but the PC just kept on going. My UPS has saved me three times in the past five years, and I get a glowy smug feeling each time it happens. Laptops are also good in this regard. I once had to use the light from my laptop as a torch.

For the rest of my equipment I use plain surge protection which has also saved me a few times.

[princec]

I find that broadband is entirely indispensable now. I don't know how I managed on ISDN before.

Regarding UPS, that's a handy side effect of using a laptop as my primary development machine.

A comfy chair is fairly essential, and a decent stereo ;)

Cas :)

[Nemesis]

An air-conditioning unit to keep from from dosing off in the afternoon heat!

[sordith]

I call your UPS (power goes out at least once a week here), broadband, and AC and I raise you a fridge.

[BongPig]

Xbox is crucial to my buisness.
:)

[Jack Norton]

I find that broadband is entirely indispensable now. I don't know how I managed on ISDN before.
don't tell me about that... :eek: the day I'll be finally using broadband it will seem to me like being in paradise :)

UPS could be interesting, even if I make backup so frequently that I rarely lose anything from a power shortage. And well, I don't use pc when outside there's a storm, also because UPS can save your pc, but a lightning can completely burn your new superhighspeed DSL modem ;)
(it happened to lot of my friends that were using pc while there was a thunderstorm).

[Nick Bischoff]

I would say speakers or some kind of radio, I have to have constant noise in the background when I work.

I would also recommend a USB flash drive. Its the best thin Ive purchased this year.

[BantamCityGames]

A pen/pencil and paper for drawing sketches, formulas, or whatever notes I need to jot down about the current module. Recently have been using polymer clays as mockups for modeling in 3d software.

A nice big, calendar style whiteboard for deadlines and checklists.

As for broadband, it is both a savior and a distraction.

A graphing calculator (overkill, but I have one from college so...).