Last night I bought a new cat5 tester to replace the one I had stolen with the rest of my tools, and with that I've concluded that my big tool purchasing is out of the way once again. Then I got to thinking about tools that a good tech needs, and I remembered my first tech tool kit back in the late 80's that my mother got me for Christmas. It included a pleather pouch that held a chip puller, screwdrivers, tweezers, and a tube to hold machine bolts.

Forward today when my tools number legion, and I've found myself using all of them on one job or another. I thought it might be cool to create a spreadsheet of tools for the starting tech, or even home user to start purchasing when they go on sale. I'm going to start by doing a basic inventory of my tools, and I'll add it to this sheet as I go.

Screwdrivers: and bits, lots of bits, including a bunch of security bits for all those machine screws and weird hex nuts that are used to keep people out of things.
Drill: with extension for bits so you can get to screws in deep wells with it. Lots of paddle bits, and other destructive bits for when you have to get medieval on a wall or something.
Lots of boot disks: hiram's, UBCD, and barts with lots and lots of plugins for AV, spyware, and defrag tools. Also a few operating system CD's for the occasional library that can get corrupted etc.
Cables: Cisco serial cable, crossover cables, patch cables, USB cables, usb/ps2 adapters, power cables, a few hundred feet of cat5 and lots of rj45 and rj11 ends.
Magnets: Magnetic dish, and telescoping magnetic pickup tools.
Soldering Iron: and solder.
Saws:Reciprocating saw, table saw, miter saw, skill saw, cutout tool.
Telephone tools Butt set, Toner, wire cutter/stripper, punch down tool, cat5/coax tester.
Flashlight I prefer a small cheap LED flashlight because it's compact, bright, and batteries last a long time.
Ladder I use a Werner folding ladder that I can easily put in the trunk of my Camry, and it folds out to a little over 10 feet. It's also handy because it works on stairs.
keyboards and mice Also a few KVM's, or one KVM with a lot of ports. I prefer to only have 2 machines per KVM however because I like more monitors.
USB memory sticks loaded up with cleaning software, also new machines can boot off these. I actually still prefer CDrom's with labels on them though. They are also handy for a quick backup.

We shall neither fail nor falter; we shall not weaken or tire..give us the tools and we will finish the job. - Winston Churchill