Must've missed that one. Here's my list:
Sears Craftsman 3.6V cordless screwdriver
- Long philips bit
- Short philips bit
- Stripped screw removing bit
- small flathead bit
- drill bit for making new holes in things and for boredom relief
I've never damaged anything with my cordless. I don't know why more techs don't use them.
Cable Stripper
Box cutter
Cable Crimper & lots of RJ45 headers
60-year-old pair of Needlenose pliers
Hemostats
- Do surprisingly well as an "extra pair of hands" for moving cables out of the way.
$7 Toolkit from local hardware store
- Has a crappy pair of pliers and an incredibly handy little interchangable screwdriver, with a number of bits that are absolutely perfect for working on laptops (plus some small precision screwdrivers), including the elusive #10 and #8 Torx bits - the whole reason I bought the kit - which are utterly essential for taking apart compaq laptops.
Electrical tape
- Used to further insulate the area around screw-holes on motherboards.
Sundry cable ties and chicken straps
- Millions of household uses
Scalpel & accordian tubing
- Make your own flat ribbon cables. Plus using a scalpel on a computer is kind of a funny sight.
3.5" long, Flat bits of thick cardboard
- %$@^&-ing drive rails
Brother P-Touch Home n' Hobby
- Handheld electric label maker. I usually label IDE0 and the LED/Power jumper block on motherboards so I can see them. Also useful when working on rackmount equipment and during cabling installs.
Lighted Magnifying glass
- For machines I didn't label, hunting for dropped screws etc
Dental mirror (i.e. "mirror on a stick")
- Bought mine at an auto-parts store. Comes in handy quite often.
2GB 2.5" IDE hard disk + 3.5" adaptor
- Contains copies of lots of useful software. Ghost, DOS6, LanMan client, Novell client for DOS, Win95A&B, 98, 98SE, 2000 Pro.... every once in awhile I run into a machine that doesn't have a CD-ROM or won't read my CD-Rs.
Extra ram
- Presently a number of high-density SO-DIMMs, a pair of 32MB FPM SIMMs, 64MB PC66, 2x 128MB PC100, a 128MB RIMM, and a 256MB DDR module. For working on intolerably crappy machines, swapping out suspected bad modules etc.
Parallel 4x CD-ROM
For annoying machines where my prepared hard disk won't work (mostly laptops or annoying all-in-ones).
Bunches of screws & jumpers
- I keep mine in those little plastic pill-reminder things. Plus there's some unorganized ones floating around...
Heat-sink compound
Dremel tool
- Mostly I use this to cut through drywall when I'm mounting jacks or something.
Spare parts
- Hayes 14.4 ISA modem (it works, dammit!), USR 8586 (hardware PCI modem), Linksys 10/100 nic, Megahertz PCMCIA modem, 3Com 10/100 PCMCIA nic, Matrox Millenium video card, audio cables, a few different HSF combos, Y-power adaptors, ATX power switch, CMOS battery, various cable converters (DB25 to DB9, PS2 to DB9 etc)...
Canned air
Binder full of CDs and floppies
- Five CD set of drivers, every OS install disk I've ever seen, several versions of every office suite, various AV packages, a number of different boot floppies, Windows updates and service packs... basically everything I have ever said "I wish I had that one disk" about.
Kleenex, bandages, surgical tape, Spray-n'wash, Spray-n'wash wipes, nitrile gloves (allergic to latex), dust mask (allergic to dust, too), clean rag, clean t-shirt, hotel-size bar soap, painters gloves (very thin gloves that keep sharp edges from biting you), deodorant, zip-lock bags.
There's also a 14" VGA monitor and an antique hand-cranked rope measure-er out in my car which are sometimes handy, and I have an oscilliscope in my apartment shoud I ever need one of those.
I carry everything around (except my binder) in a big soft-sided tackle box. Unlike Tannin, my work has to move around with me, so I'm well aware of what it can take to work on PCs from time to time.
Usually it's just a screwdriver, though.