Tripplite
Traveler 100BT Mobile Surge Suppressor: $19
www.tripplite.com

CHANCES ARE GOOD THAT YOUR CUSTOMER'S LAPTOP HAS many of the same files you'd find on his desktop workstation. Although that workstation is protected by at least a surge strip if not a full-blown UPS, the notebook plugs right into a wall socket without any protection whatsoever. You can change that by using Tripp Lite's Traveler 100BT Mobile Surge Suppressor, an inexpensive adapter that plugs right into the wall to deliver a 1,050 joule rating.

The Traveler isn't as heavy-duty as most desktop power strips—a fact made evident by Tripp Lite's lightweight $50,000 equipment protection guarantee. However, the 1,050 joule suppression rating still protects against powerful surges and the line noise experienced when you leave the relative safety of your own office. A response time of less than one nanosecond is right up there with most popular desktop models.

Tripp Lite's Traveler occupies just one electrical socket, but it offers two protected outlets. There's also a connector for Ethernet or phone line protection if your customer is connected to a hotel network or dialing in remotely. A lifetime warranty complements Tripp Lite's equipment protection coverage.

Targus
USB 2.0 DVD/CD-RW External Drive: $189
www.targus.com

Today's notebooks are increasingly arriving with combination DVD/CD-RW drives. But I've owned my share of single-purpose components and appreciate drives able to handle multiple types of optical media. If your customer has an older notebook with limited functionality, Targus' USB 2.0 DVD/CD-RW drive makes for an attractive upsell opportunity.

The super-slim drive is able to burn CDs at 24x and read DVDs at up to 8x. It draws its power from the USB bus, so there's no need for an AC adapter. The USB connector used to interface with your customer's notebook actually employs a pass-through, enabling other peripherals to piggy-back on the same port. Targus wraps the package up with a software bundle that includes CD burning software and a DVD playback app.

Sapphire
PI-AM2RS690MHD Socket AM2 Motherboard: $119
www.sapphiretech.com

DIFFERENTIATION IN THE CHIPSET MARKET IS TOUGH WORK. So many platforms include so many features that high-end users expect multiple SATA 3 Gbps ports, high-def audio, Gigabit Ethernet, and plenty of scalability built-in. Anything less gets shuffled away. Fortunately, AMD made sure that it's 690G chipset was something to write home about. Its aggressive feature set is enough to pique the interest of enthusiasts, even while it powers motherboards priced as value-oriented solutions.

Sapphire has one of the first motherboards based on the 690G. Its somewhat obscurely-named PI-AM2RS690MHD is decked out with an all-white PCB and each of the features your customers have come to expect from competing vendors. For example, a quartet of DDR2 memory slots work with frequencies up to 800 MHz and capacities of up to 8GB. PCI Express x16, PCI Express x1, and standard PCI slots are all available for expansion. And a number of USB, FireWire, SATA, and standard IDE connectors help the board scale well. Sapphire even integrates Gigabit Ethernet to make up for the chipset's lack of networking.

By far, the board's most exciting attribute is its integrated graphics set. Thanks to the marriage of AMD and ATI, the processor giant has access to some of the best video technology available. The 690G chipset includes Radeon X1250 graphics, which revolve around DirectX 9. The core is extremely powerful—faster, in fact, than any other integrated graphics solution available. Sapphire enables AMD's graphics core through a VGA output and a digital HDMI port. Customers with high-end TVs will recognize HDMI as the newest digital output, capable of transferring audio and video over one connection. The combination, together with the 690G's other features, make Sapphire's PI-AM2RS690MHD one of the hottest digital media boards out there.

Seagate
FreeAgent Pro 750: $359
www.seagate.com

UP UNTIL NOW, EXTERNAL hard drives have played a passive, albeit useful, role in preserving data. Many come with backup software, which reaches out and runs those incremental saves every night, but that's about the extent of storage intelligence. Seagate's FreeAgent Pro is a different sort of backup drive—you can tell just by looking at the cocoa-brown enclosure. Inside, Seagate includes its largest 3.5" SATA drive, weighing in at 750GB. The whole package connects using either USB 2.0 or eSATA, the latter option delivering 3 Gbps of throughput.

Although the FreeAgent's hardware specs are certainly impressive, it's what software allows the drive to do that'll impress your customers most. They're able to flag content for duplication, have it transferred to an iPod automatically, upload to an online photo service, or copy particularly important files to a remote location where they're physically protected from disaster. FreeAgent Pro saves new versions of modified content automatically. Moreover, should your customer contract a virus and need to roll back Windows, the FreeAgent's protected files will remain current.

Seagate's value proposition to the professional road warrior is clear: Use the FreeAgent on your workstation at home to automatically ensure that documents, presentations, and media files you need away from home base are always available. At $350, your SMB customer isn't even really paying a premium over other external drives.